In a classroom at Eastside High School, Garyel Tubbs pored over spreadsheets, research and data on racial literacy disparities.
Two years later, a bill she drafted is before the Florida Legislature.
Rep. Yvonne Hinson met Tubbs while she was interning in her office and invited her to work on a gun violence prevention initiative. Gun violence had been recently declared a public health crisis by the Alachua County Board of County Commissioners.
Tubbs suggested a mental-health-based approach, as it “isn’t necessarily focused on” in communities with increased levels of gun violence.
What started as an internship research project soon became much more. “Her aide was new at the time and told me Hinson wanted me to write the whole bill,” Tubbs said, “I didn't know anything, so I drafted the bill myself.”
Growing up in Gainesville’s Eastside and going to a Title I school where “a lot of my peers were victims of gun violence or perpetrators of it,” Tubbs’s personal experience inspired her to create social change.
Her training in the International Baccalaureate program taught her how to question statistics – and recognize when they were being manipulated.
Tubbs’s draft later became the basis for House Bill 155, which would establish a Gun Violence Prevention Pilot Program through IMPACT GNV.
The program would create programs providing mental health services, conflict resolution training and job training for youth ages 10 to 21 at risk of gun violence, either as victims or perpetrators.
Hinson, a previous 14-year school administrator, believes increases in gun violence are due to the isolation of COVID-19. The Center for American Progress found that “while there is evidence that the U.S. homicide rate was rising prior to the pandemic’s onset, it is undeniable that an immediate, sustained, and significant increase in homicides followed.”
“We did fist fights, and now they're doing guns. With fist fights, you get up bloody and go home, and you live to see the next day. But with guns, it's final,” Hinson said.
She acknowledged there is a lack of data supporting a connection between mental health and gun violence, which is why she is eager to pilot the program.
“We're doing the pilot in the first place because there was no real evidence to connect mental health with gun violence prevention,” Hinson said.
However, she recognizes this bill will face a steep climb due to the Republican supermajority in the legislature, where few Democratic bills pass, but is confident that it will.
She consulted many Republicans in writing the bill, she said, and is considering co-sponsorships with Republicans to help the bill advance.
“I have gone through every possible issue to resolve that might even come up; we believe we've resolved every issue that's out there,” Hinson said.
In past sessions, Hinson’s bills have been dropped, just for Republicans to reintroduce them and get credit for them in the next session, she said. However, she is “good with that.”
“I’ve realized that if I want to get it back to the public, I'm sometimes going to have to let it go and let someone else do it,” Hinson said, although she is not planning to do that with this bill.
Outside of the legislature, the bill is facing pushback from gun rights advocates. Luis Valdes, the Florida director of Gun Owners of America, said he is monitoring the bill and would testify against it if it reaches committee.
He believes the bill violates the Second Amendment, and “is using mental health as a cover to institute gun control.”
“Violence is all-encompassing, because if you simply remove firearms from the picture, someone can still be violent,” said Valdes.
Valdes does agree that mental health deserves more government funding, but should not be linked to gun laws.
GOA believes gun control and mental health are “two completely different things,” and “more importantly, it doesn't really resolve the issue that is the mental health crisis in the United States,” he said.
Cassidy Reller, a gun policy researcher and UF political science professor, doubts this bill will pass this session.
Gun laws are “kind of a hot potato for Republicans and Democrats,” Reller said. He said Florida’s political climate and the state’s ongoing Department of Government Efficiency investigation in Gainesville make the bill’s success even more difficult.
“I would be surprised if they gave resources to the city of Gainesville, which is a super democratic city, instead of to other areas that are more Republican,” said Reller.
Engaging with the topic of guns is “a politically scary topic” for a lot of Republicans, because they don’t want to risk angering members of their political party coalition and gun rights activists, he added.
Hinson refiled the bill on Oct. 14, appropriating $500,000 to the Department of Children and Families that would expire in 2030. The bill is currently sitting in the Florida House Justice Budget Subcommittee.
Now a UF sophomore political science student, Tubbs has continued pursuing social change as the founder of ProjectHER, Inc., which aims to empower young black women.
Regardless of whether the bill passes, Tubbs’s mission remains the same: using experience and data-based research to improve communities like the one she grew up in.