Frank Cerabino’s column explaining the lie of \
Florida lawmakers are checking another box on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign to-do list by making Florida a “constitutional carry” state.
“I can’t tell you exactly when, but I’m pretty confident that I will be able to sign ‘constitutional carry’ into law in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said last year. “The Legislature will get it done.”
Encouraging Floridians to walk around in public with a loaded weapon, a weapon they can carry without any training on how it should be safely carried, used or stored, dovetails with his “free state of Florida” presidential campaign.
And so, like clockwork, the Republican-supermajority state Legislature is once again doing his bidding this spring by pushing through the new gun law before DeSantis formally announces his candidacy for national office.
Check.
But there’s a bit of dissension in the OK Corral. And it’s coming from the gun-rights stalwarts who feel that Florida’s new law would be just a showy “baby step” and not the sort of full-throated Second Amendment endorsement they had expected from DeSantis and his legislative lackeys.
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I’ll explain. But first, it must be mentioned that the term “constitutional carry” is a political fiction meant to confer bedrock rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, rights that aren’t there.
“Constitutional carry” is like “legitimate rape.” It doesn’t exist.
The gun industry has spent a fortune promoting the false notion that the right of everyday, law-abiding American citizens to possess firearms is hard-wired into the Second Amendment.
Historian Garry Wills put it this way:
“Easy access to all these guns is hard to justify in pragmatic terms, and as a matter of social policy,” Wills wrote. “That is why the gun advocates appeal, above pragmatism and common sense, to a supposed sacred right enshrined in a document Americans revere.
“We must put up with our world-record rates of homicide, suicide and accidental shootings because, whether we like it or not, the Constitution tells us to,” Wills continued. “Well, it doesn’t.”
Former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, appointed to the high court by (Republican) President Richard Nixon in 1969, later called the NRA’s distorted interpretation of the Second Amendment one of the “greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by a special interest group.”
And it wasn’t until “activist judges” on the right got busy in 2008 to pass the first case in our history that conferred individual rights of gun ownership for personal protection. The creative decision in the case, District of Columbia v.
