A state appeals court stoked the unique American propensity for gun violence by declaring open carry of firearms to be legal in our state.
Hours later, the charismatic young right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered on a Utah campus. He was killed with a rifle, shot in the throat mid-sentence in a dialogue about mass shootings.
That was a particularly fraught coincidence. But there is no day the Florida court could have chosen to issue its deplorable decision when a shooting somewhere would not have been a counterpoint.
Former President Obama spoke for all decent Americans as he decried Kirk’s assassination.
“This kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy,” he said.
A deadly daily reality
He neglected to say “no rightful place.” Its actual place is all too obvious. Gun violence is the unique daily reality of life in America.
There were 24 other shootings on Wednesday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, with seven innocent lives lost. Two Colorado high school students were critically injured by a classmate who then killed himself.
It had been less than three months since the targeted murder of Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the Minnesota House and her husband, and less than a year since two attempts to kill President Trump during his election campaign.
Twenty people were shot and two children died at a Catholic school in Minneapolis on Aug. 27.
A three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeal at Tallahassee flouted a 2015 decision of the Florida Supreme Court upholding state law against the open carrying of firearms in public.
The First District’s duty was to uphold the precedent even if the judges didn’t agree with it. The 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision they cited as an overriding precedent had to do with concealed weapon permitting, not open carry. The panel used it as cover to give the gun lobby everything it wanted.
Black-robed arrogance
Then the appeals court compounded its arrogance by not certifying the issue to the state’s high court.
Attorney General James Uthmeier won’t appeal the decision, so someone else should try to get it before the court by invoking what’s called its “all writs” jurisdiction.
That’s a very appropriate role for Senate President Ben Allbritton or other legislators who have bravely resisted the persistent political pandering of the gun lobby’s principal Florida acolytes, Uthmeier and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Well into the 20th century, Florida was the last frontier state east of the Mississippi. There were fewer than a million Floridians then; there are nearly 24 million now. The density calls out for more gun regulations, not fewer.
The decision still leaves some places off limits, including college campuses and any private property whose owners forbid weapons on their premises.
Florida is already inundated with guns in public places, of course, more so since 2023, when the Legislature and DeSantis made it legal for most people to carry concealed weapons in public without a permit. You just can’t see them until it’s too late.
Some argue that the public is safer with guns in full view rather than hidden. The District Court seems to think so. But the decision also applies to assault weapons, other rifles and shotguns, not only handguns.
We doubt that most Floridians will feel safer sharing their public space with people toting AR-15s to flaunt their manhood.
What’s most wrong with the decision is its twisted logic: the unsubtle underlying message that guns are good, and the more, the better. Expect to see them everywhere now, as Rep. Darryl Campbell, D-Fort Lauderdale, predicts, “from grocery stores to sidewalks to playgrounds.”
Florida already ranks No. 2, behind Texas, in gun sales. A four-month sales tax holiday, now in effect, applies to guns and ammo and camping and fishing gear.
There’s a profound irony in Kirk’s murder. At a public appearance in 2023, the Turning Point USA founder acknowledged that “having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is a part of liberty.”
Charlie Kirk on guns
Likening gun deaths to traffic deaths, Kirk said neither are totally preventable.
“I think it’s worth it,” he said. “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Kirk had made it clear that he wasn’t talking about hunting or even self-defense. “The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government,” he said.
That wasn’t quite right. The purpose was to keep “a well-regulated militia” in an age when there was no standing army and the greatest fears were of Indian uprisings and slave revolts. Today, a paranoia flourishes in which the government — our government — is our natural enemy.
With the reactionary majority of the U.S. Supreme Court having divorced the Second Amendment from its founding purpose, it has taken on a mystique of its own.
It is now as if guns are America’s paramount virtue, more so than even the basic human right to live in peace and safety.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
