How Many Guns Does Florida Have? Only Concealed Weapons Accounted For As State Mulls Eradicating 'Gun-Free-Zones'

As legislators from Florida gear up to debate the more-than-dozen gun-related bills, including Democratic proposals for banning on assault-style rifles and the Republican's proposal of allowing more concealed guns in public areas, one question stands out — How many guns does the sunshine state have?

Republican lawmakers such as Sen. Dennis Baxley, of Ocala, and Rep. Don Hahnfeldt, of The Villages, have been pushing for proposals that would allow people to carry concealed weapon with permits everywhere, including local bars, voting booths, courthouses, public schools, colleges and university campuses and airport passenger terminals.

Read: How To Buy A Gun: Fewer People Now Buy Guns Without Background Checks, Report Says

One of these measures — SB 616 that allows concealed-weapons permit holders to carry their weapons to courthouses — passed the Senate Judiciary Committee with a 5-4 vote Tuesday, according to the Miami Herald. However, the proposal only allows permit-holders to store the gun at security checkpoints outside the courthouse premises. The proposals advocating for the expansion of gun rights follows the deadly Orlando nightclub and Fort Lauderdale airport shootings.

“This (proposed gun law proposal) gives these businesses and institutions an opportunity to better protect themselves, their place of business, their employees and their guests in the event of an unfortunate incident. …so that maybe the next Pulse, the next Fort Lauderdale ... may not happen,” Hahnfeldt had told the Herald while commenting on the set of proposed legislations.

Florida has about 1.9 million guns (as of Feb. 28, 2016), the most in the country. The number, which was confirmed by Politifact who fact checked the then presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, speaking at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention, last April.

“(Florida had) well over 1.3 million law-abiding Floridians with a valid concealed-weapons permit …That’s the most in the nation,” Bush had said. However, Florida only keeps data on the concealed firearms as firearm purchasing does not require licensing or registration of the weapons.

Licenses of all concealed firearms in the State are issued by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs. They also maintain a database of total concealed-weapons permits. But unlike the district of Columbia and Hawaii, which mandate registration of all weapons, and in the absence of nationwide federal legislation (only 19 states — including Nevada, as of Jan. 1 — have imposed some regulations on private gun transfers over the past 20 years), central registration of all weapons is not mandatory.

“Similarly, county sheriff’s departments are given information about firearms licenses, acquisitions, and transfers as a copy for local law enforcement, but can only keep this information for about 20 days. After that it must be destroyed. No database is maintained,” notes Muckrock, a non-profit investigative news site who filed requests asking for policies and statistics regarding gun acquisition, licensure, and transfer in each of the 67 counties in Florida.

Muckrock also noticed major discrepancies in the crime data on incidents involving firearms, which it collected from two sources — sheriff’s department’s data and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s annual Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) on each county. While the sheriffs department said that there were about 440 aggravated assaults involving a firearm in Orange country for the year 2015, UCR tallies the same figure at 1,714.

Though no one knows the exact number of guns in Florida, it is no stranger to gun law debates. The ‘Stand Your Ground’ rule was a major controversy after George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Treyvon Martin. In fact, the deadly shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2017 happened a day after a new gun control bill was introduced that sought a ban on assault rifles and ammunition in response to the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that left 49 people dead in June.