Florida Has Correct Response to FSU Shooting

A year ago, a student brought two firearms onto the campus of Florida State University and opened fire. It wasn’t as bad of an event as Parkland, but it was bad enough to spur the legislature into action, just like Parkland.

Only this time, they didn’t embrace scads of new gun control laws that accomplish nothing but make life difficult for people who did nothing wrong.

Instead, they had the correct response. It wasn’t a perfect response, but the correct one. They recognized that more guns on campus would have ended this shooting much sooner.

Even as the shooting sparked student outrage and protests calling for gun regulations, the Legislature actually accelerated efforts to loosen restrictions in the weeks after the FSU shooting, ending a prohibition on the carrying of firearms during a declared emergency and allowing probation officers to carry concealed firearms while off duty. 

And then a year later, the Second Amendment lobby got lawmakers to allow unlicensed armed volunteered security at churches, and the House and Senate to include sales tax holidays for firearm accessories, including holsters, magazines, and sights in their budget proposals. 

A third measure approved in 2026 and waiting for review by Gov. Ron DeSantis is criticized by opponents as a backdoor attempt to allow the concealed carry of guns on campus and celebrated by supporters as a first-of-its-kind campus safety and security initiative. 

That bill (HB 757) expands to higher education the “Guardian Program” established after the 2018 shooting that arms school staff to stop an active shooter. Fifty-three school districts participate in the program without any notable incidents since its creation.  

But bill sponsor Rep. Michelle Salzman, R-Pensacola, said the measure is not a gun proposal but a school safety measure. She calls the bill’s mental health requirements as the most important components with the guardian provision one facet of an omnibus campus security proposal. 

Because it’s about school safety.

Of course, the author of this piece thinks this is a terrible thing, and the proper response would be more gun control, though he doesn’t elaborate on just what. After all, the 20-year-old was barred from buying guns already, so he just took them from his step-mother, a police officer. FSU was and is a gun-free zone, where no one except law enforcement–and now, people involved in the Guardian Program–could carry firearms. Murder itself is, as it’s always been since the Garden of Eden, illegal.

None of that stopped the attack.

What might have done a lot of good, though, is a bullet or 12 to center mass when this twerp decided to try and make a name for himself.

More guns are the correct approach here because it increases school safety significantly. It’s not the perfect response, though, because that would be the total removal of that whole “gun-free zone” thing on college campuses. While the author of this, James Call, clearly thinks that Florida is just tripping over itself to remove all gun control laws, the truth is that the legislature isn’t really eager to do much of anything pro-gun. They’re not going to pass campus carry anytime soon.

That is a shame, because that would have been the ideal solution to deter future mass shooters from trying it on a college campus.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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