Floridains sometimes like to pretend they’re a much freer state than they actually are. I’ve literally heard politicians there talk about how they were the most free state in the nation.
Meanwhile, they have waiting period for gun sales, age restrictions that bar legal adults under the age of 21 from buying any firearm, and no open carry except in a small handful of very specific circumstances. That’s not the freest state in the nation in my book.
But they did get a form of permitless carry recently. It’s just concealed, but at least you can carry without a permit.
And a lot of people said that Florida’s problems were about to get worse, that there would be so many more guns on the streets and bloodshed would be common. Some have called all permitless carry schemes “criminal carry,” even.
During the 2022-23 school year, the Leon County School District reported confiscating 10 firearms from school campuses. So far this school year, the district has only confiscated one firearm.
Jimmy Williams, chief of safety, security and emergency management, credits the success to the implementation of several weapon deterring initiatives and the commitment of the district’s safety and security team.
He shared data and best practices with district staff, Florida A&M University police and Leon County Sheriff’s deputies on Thursday during a safety forum to expand on why safety and security is not an independent priority, but a community one.
“This is a comprehensive approach to school safety and security, and even with the technology that we’ve been blessed with today, our number one resource of school safety is the community,” Williams told the Tallahassee Democrat inside the district’s security portable.
Now, realistically, permitless carry has nothing at all to do with this one way or another. Permitless carry doesn’t extent to schools, for the most part, and these kids would never be covered by it one way or another.
Instead, this is really the result of school safety measures that might have been really helpful had they been in place before Parkland.
Regardless, my point here is that for all the doomsaying after constitutional or permitless carry passes somewhere, what we tend to see are markers suggesting the opposite. These places are largely safer.
Were I inclined to play by the same rules anti-gunners play by, I’d argue it’s expressly because of permitless carry. I don’t only because correlation isn’t causation and one needs to be careful not to attribute causation to the wrong thing. The mechanisms that lead to violent crime are complicated.
In this case, we have a pretty good reason to believe that permitless carry didn’t do anything for Florida schools, but it is interesting that there’s yet another example of things seemingly being safer since it passed, rather than more dangerous as opponents of the law argued. They blew it yet again.
Honestly, the most impressive thing to me is how anti-gun rhetoric keeps being proven to be wrong, yet is still taken seriously by so many, including the media. It’s right up there with the flat earth crowd.
