Fear Over Florida Open Carry Hinges on Ignorance or Stupidity, If Not Both

Floridian gun rights advocates fought for open carry for years. They finally got it, but not through the Republican supermajority in the legislature, which seems disinterested in protecting and restoring the Second Amendment. No, they got it in court.

It doesn’t matter, though, because a win is a win.

Publix, one of the biggest grocery store chains in the South, has said it will do nothing to prohibit open carry in its Florida stores. That has some freaking out over going there, as noted in this report.

Brian Lupiani is rethinking his life-long relationship with Publix Supermarkets now that the grocery store chain is allowing customers to openly carry firearms in their stores. 

“I just don’t want to get caught in the crossfire over the last jar of peanut butter,” the Tallahassee resident said. 

…

There are nearly 2.6 million Floridians with concealed-weapons permit, according to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Caught in the crossfire over peanut butter?

There are only four states now that ban open carry. In other words, Florida joined the other 45.

Guess how many shootings happened because someone who was open carrying got into a gunfight with someone over the last jar of peanut butter, or anything else?

If you said “zero,” then give yourself a cookie. You earned it.

Every time there’s a pro-gun move, we have someone like Lupiani who claims there will be all these shootings in every corner of their community or state, even though that’s never happened anywhere else with an identical law.

And it doesn’t stop there.

When concealed-carry permits were required, Lupiani said at least firearms were concealed and not easily accessible but now he fears people can “just literally shoot from the hip.” 

And here we see why it might not just be stupidity at work here. Oh, don’t get me wrong, Lupiani is a full-on leftist based on his X feed, though I don’t want anyone to go over there and start stuff with him. He probably has a lot of stupid ideas about guns.

But if he thinks concealed carry isn’t easily accessible, he’s got to be completely ignorant of what concealed carry actually is, though I guess he really could be that dumb.

When I carry concealed, as is my preferred method, my gun is easily accessible. If not, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to carry that way. I might have to move a shirt out of my way, which takes less than half a second, but I can get to that gun pretty quickly, and I’m far from the quickest at that.

People, if they were so inclined, can still “just literally shoot from the hip” even if their gun is concealed.

I guess folks like Lupiani think “concealed” means we’re carrying a gun safe in our back pocket, and have to open that up after remembering the combination, load the firearm, then deploy it defensively or something.

Whether it’s stupidity, ignorance, or both, the truth is that a lot of people don’t understand that with 2.6 million people with concealed carry permits, all before permitless concealed carry passed, if they were going to see gunfights in the grocery store over stupid stuff, they’d have already seen them. Open carry doesn’t change that. It changes nothing.

In fact, criminals do not open carry. Ever.

They don’t want a cop who knows their rap sheet to any degree to see they’ve got a gun, so they’ll conceal it all day long.

But hey, somehow that never makes it into these reports. Weird, isn’t it?