WASHINGTON -- After another school shooting last week, this time in Texas, Florida lawmakers in Washington are taking another opportunity to try to address this uniquely American problem.
- Florida's DC delegation looking at ways to curb school shootings
- Nelson to introduce bill to add mental health counselors in schools
- Gov. Rick Scott wants $1M to fix delays in mental health database
Sen. Bill Nelson, working on a new piece of legislation, would like to see more mental health counselors in America's schools.
He had hoped that the Parkland shooting would have been the last time he would have to confront this, but with 10 now dead after the shooting at Santa Fe High School near Houston, he said his legislation could bring lawmakers together in a bipartisan way.
“We’re talking about something that would help start stopping all of this carnage, this terrible violence that is going on in our schools,” Nelson said.
According to figures from 2016, Florida has about one school psychologist for every 2000 students. Nelson's bill would provide grants to college and universities that train new school psychologists, social workers and mental health counselors.
This comes as lawmakers are also looking to address another problem playing out specifically in the Sunshine State: a Politico report found that up to 20 percent of mental health records are delayed in getting entered into Florida databases, which could allow mentally ill people to buy firearms.
Gov. Rick Scott has asked for $1 million to help close this gap.
The Florida delegation in Congress is also playing a role in this, urging the Department of Justice to provide federal funding that would go toward ensuring these background check databases have accurate information.
"I think we are at the point, yet another school shooting -- we're still grieving about what happened at Pulse, we're still grieving about what happened at Parkland. We are still grieving about what has happened, unfortunately, all over this country too often," Democratic Rep. Val Demings said. "I think we are at a place now where we have got to get the federal, state and local level working together to leverage our resources and deal with this problem."
But some others in the Florida delegation say there are other issues at play.
“I’m concerned that the FBI itself doesn’t have the tools to be able to assimilate data on mental health care and then to be able to operationalize that to do investigations," said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-District 1. "Better record keeping, better production of records, better assimilation of data will absolutely help us."