It seems there’s a problem with gun confiscations at various tourist locations in Florida. Now, Florida is a fairly gun-friendly state, so this isn’t an artifact of new gun control laws making it impossible for people to carry guns.

No, this is something else.

Yet because of Florida’s status as a tourism destination, it seems a travel writer decided to weigh in on the matter, and it goes about as you’d expect.

The development, unearthed through a search of public records by the Orlando Sentinel, is just one of several suggesting that guns are a stealth issue for the state’s visitor industry.

Over 100 illegal guns were confiscated by authorities on Miami Beach earlier this year during a six-week period of spring break.

…

The problem is said to stem in part from an increase in gun purchases during the pandemic. Nationwide, more than 20,000 people were killed last year in the U.S. by firearms, a record number according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Although there’s no hard proof, the rise in deaths seems to parallel a more aggressive attitude in some parts of the population toward the exercise of Second Amendment rights. Put plainly, more people may be carrying weapons than in the past.

Now, I’ll give the author credit for at least acknowledging that there’s a possibility that we’re not somehow responsible for the skyrocketing homicide rate.

However, he clearly does try to lay the blame on the surge in firearm purchases.

It seems he wasn’t aware of a recent study that noted that the increase in homicides isn’t because of the increase in gun sales. Especially since the gun buying surge started months before the increase in violent crime.

So what’s really going on?

Well, what our intrepid writer failed to note is that as crime increases, so too does people’s desire to carry a gun. They’re not walking into Disney with a gun because they want to shoot up the place. They’re trying to walk into Disney with a gun because they don’t trust they’ll be safe between the gate and their car.

Simply put, they’re concerned about becoming a crime statistic so they carry a gun to prevent that.

See, when people started buying guns in such numbers, it was because of the pandemic, economic uncertainty, shortages at the grocery store, and a host of other things. Then came the death of George Floyd and the riots that followed. With it came a spike in violent crime unlike anything we’d seen for decades.

As a result, gun sales continued being high, even after much of the initial fear regarding the pandemic was over. Now there was a new fear.

With crime remaining high, gun sales will remain high.

But I get more than a little annoyed when someone leaves their lane so completely and fumbles on some basic information like what’s going on with the current gun-buying increase and the increase in violent crime. It’s almost like he, as so many of his media colleagues do, only contact someone like Giffords or Brady and got their take as if they are anything but a biased organization trying to manipulate the current situation so as to advance their radical anti-gun agenda.

It’s a shame, too, because if people are traveling to Florida, they might want the real scoop on what’s going on, not the narrative.