South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Guns in Florida: pervasive and soon permitless
TALLAHASSEE — Is a loaded gun the problem, or is it the solution?
Republicans say guns, in the right hands, make a lot more safe.
Democrats say more guns make us a lot more vulnerable.
This old argument takes on new urgency with the current political fight in Tallahassee over permitless carry, allowing people to carry a gun without having to first get a concealed carry permit, which requires safety instruction and a background check.
“Bad people are going to continue to do bad things,” argued Republican Sen. Jim Boyd of Bradenton, a permitless carry supporter. “I want all the good guys with guns there can be.”
“We have so many people who live irresponsibly, and many of us pay the consequences of that,” countered Democratic Sen. Rosalind Osgood of Fort Lauderdale. “This is going to open the door … to more harm and more pain.”
When the bill (SB 150) was debated Thursday in the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee, many young women, in starkly emotional terms, pleaded with senators not to pass a “reckless and dangerous” bill. Their pleas did no good. The bill passed 13-6, with every yes vote from a Republican and every no vote but one from a Democrat. (The lone Republican senator to vote no was Miami’s Ileana Garcia.)
Permitless carry is a lock to pass the Senate and House and reach the desk of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has all but demanded its passage.
The governor wants to take permitless carry on the presidential campaign trail to Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere, despite the growing chorus of angry gun-rights supporters castigating him for not insisting on an even more outrageous open carry law.
But Florida sheriffs, who provide the essential political cover in Tallahassee for lax gun laws, oppose open carry, which also poses a grave threat to Florida’s family-friendly tourism image.
At a tense hearing, Isabella Burgos, a first-year student at Florida State University from Miami-Dade, was among those arguing against the bill.
“Permitless carry is asking me to bulletproof myself,” she told senators, “even when I sleep.”
Burgos, a volunteer with Students Demand Action, won a prestigious Silver Knight Award from The Miami Herald as a high school senior in Doral last year.
But after her testimony went online Thursday, she naturally was vilified on social media. On Twitter, somebody posted an image of Burgos in an FSU theater production and asked, “Gee, who would have guessed she’s a ‘drama’ student at FSU?”
This is the society in which Florida is about to make it easier to carry a gun, even though 2.6 million concealed weapons licenses are already out there.
Hate, and the growing sense of a fraying social fabric, was at the heart of Sen. Geraldine Thompson’s arguments against permitless carry.
The Orlando-area Democrat has tenaciously fought many losing battles through the years in Tallahassee. Her moving speech honored the memory of the victims of a March 1 shooting on a quiet suburban street in the Pine Hills community in her district.
The three victims included 9-year-old T’yonna Major, who loved gymnastics, and a 24-year-old TV reporter for Spectrum News, Dylan Lyons; two others were critically wounded. Five lives shattered in an instant. A 19-year-old suspect has been charged in the attacks.
“There’s a breakdown in the village — the village that it takes to raise a child,” Thompson said, with too much mental illness and domestic violence, and video games that desensitize young people to gun violence in a nation with easier access to guns than any other developed country in the world.
“And there’s hate,” Thompson said, stating the obvious. “There’s hate for various individuals, hate for various groups. That is all pervasive — not only in my community, but in the state of Florida and throughout the nation.”
Pervasive.
Pervasive — and pretty soon, permitless.