A Florida hospital association wants the state Legislature to ban firearms from hospitals, but the National Rifle Association says that’s not going to happen.
The South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association, in presenting its agenda to the 2012 Legislature, has once more included a request to “add ‘licensed hospitals and nursing homes’ to the Safety Zone provisions of the Concealed Weapons Law,”
The Miami Herald reported Tuesday.
“It’s just common sense,” the association’s Linda Quick told the Herald. “You don’t want guns in schools. Why on earth would you want them in hospitals?”
She acknowledged hospital shootings are rare, but said they do occur. She pointed to a murder-suicide at the Cleveland Clinic Hospital in Weston, Fla., in 2007 and the shooting death of a pregnant pharmacy worker at a Jacksonville hospital in 2006.
There’s no such bill currently before the Legislature, but in the past the NRA has successfully opposed efforts to ban guns from Florida hospitals and said it will continue to do so.
“NRA would oppose a bill that panders to the anti-gun political agenda of South Florida organizations,” Marion Hammer, the Tallahassee lobbyist for the NRA, said in an email to the Herald.
She said any such bill would infringe on the rights of doctors and other hospital workers who want to carry arms for their own protection.
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