Florida House Overwhelmingly Approves Campus Carry

The Florida House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a campus carry bill.

Guns would be allowed on college campuses under a bill passed by the Florida House.

The House voted 80-37 to pass the bill after an hour-and-a-half of contentious debate Wednesday. Republicans said the bill would keep campuses safer while Democrats argued just the opposite.

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The vote shows a basic difference in the philosophical outlook of the two main political parties in the United States.

Republicans, as a general rule, think that citizens should have more liberty and that people can generally be trusted to act responsibly in their best interests and in the interests of society at large. That is why they view having concealed carriers on campus as a positive step. They view it as having additional campus security in the event of crime (or in a much less likely scenario of a mass shooting or a terrorist attack).

Anti-gun Democrats—who sadly have driven millions of conservative and liberal gun-owning Democrats to the fringes of the party—think that people are inherently incapable of taking care of themselves and acting like adults if government isn’t there to force them to follow rules and hover over them as a “helicopter parent” with a strict list of what they can and cannot do. These politicians are terrified not only irrationally terrified of firearms as a tool, but of the liberty that firearms symbolize. They are like the fear-wracked parent hovering over a perfectly functional young person heading off to college, irrationally convinced that the normal process of maturing and seeking more knowledge and responsibility will lead to their doom.

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I’m going to suggest that as this legislation progresses anti-gun Democrats are going to scream—as they screamed when the concealed carry revolution started in Florida three decades ago—that the result of this law will be “blood in the streets.”

Once campus law is approved, in this legislative session or another, we’ll see that their claims were false.

That is the way it has always been, and the way it will always likely be.

 

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