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October 1, 2022

Ron DeSantis’s Second Amendment announcement shows why the 2A matters

By Andrea Widburg

For once, the media is not exaggerating: Florida suffered a horrific blow when Hurricane Ian smashed into it. More than a million homes and businesses are without electricity, thousands of homes have been fully or partially destroyed, and farms are underwater. The infrastructure is temporarily broken and, whenever that happens, out come the looters. Gov. Ron DeSantis, however, told looters that Floridians are armed, a reminder for all of us why the Second Amendment matters. In response, MSNBC’s Joy Reid cried...wait for it...racism!

This post is not about Florida’s travails, which are covered in myriad other articles. (See here and here, for example.) All we can do is send prayers and, if you’re interested and able, funds to help out.

Instead, this post is about one very specific problem that always arises when people are—or appear to have been—driven from their homes, and that’s looting. One person’s tragedy is another, unprincipled person’s disaster. For those contemplating taking advantage of the police’s inability to answer calls, Ron DeSantis had a simple message—Floridians are very likely to be armed.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a pointed warning to anyone looking to take advantage of the chaos caused by Hurricane Ian.

“Don’t even think about looting. Don’t even think about taking advantage of people in this vulnerable situation. And so local law enforcement is involved in monitoring that,” he said during a Friday news conference.

“You can have people you know bringing boats into some of these islands and trying to ransack people’s homes. I can tell you, in the state of Florida, you never know what may be lurking behind somebody’s home, and I would not wanna chance that if I were you, given that we’re a Second Amendment state,” he added.

DeSantis is right, and his reminder about the Second Amendment’s utility could not be more timely. As was vividly illustrated in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it wasn’t true that “when seconds count, the police are minutes away.” In fact, when seconds counted, the police were days away, if people were lucky. For people unacquainted with or uninterested in the Eighth Commandment (“thou shalt not steal”), Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath was like being told that the door to the alarm at the candy store was off, the employees had gone home, and the door was unlocked.

We saw the same thing across America in 2020: With law enforcement in retreat thanks to Black Lives Matter’s and Soros prosecutors’ attacks on policing norms, looting became the name of the game. Indeed, looting has gotten completely out of hand lately as vicious, unprincipled, power-hungry Democrats tell Blacks that they can ignore the law with impunity. When abused communities finally reinstate the law with a vengeance, as they inevitably will, those same misled Blacks will find themselves in jail, if they’re lucky; dead if they’re not.

Looting becomes less enticing when there’s a good chance someone will meet you with a gun. Moreover, because Florida has a “stand your ground” law, a homeowner has no obligation to run away from a looter. Instead, home and business owners have the right to defend against someone who has entered their property with evil in his (or her) mind and heart. In a “stand your ground” state, the odds favor the homeowner, and it takes a stupid or suicidal looter to go looking for trouble. This is good for society as a whole, saving people’s property and discouraging young people from dangerous criminal activity.

And that societal benefit, of course, is why Joy Reid, of Harvard and MSNBC, is outraged by DeSantis’s statement, which she immediately asserted is racist:

Reid just conceded that the looters (i.e., criminals) in Florida are all Black. What an amazingly racist thing to say.

But of course, what she really meant is that, because a segregationist 55 years ago believed in shooting looters, all threats against looters are henceforth racist. One would think that someone at Harvard would have taught Reid about true and false syllogisms. This one is very, very false. Here’s another false syllogism: Joy Reid went to Harvard. Joy Reid is exceptionally dull-witted. All Harvard grads are dull-witted.

I’ll end with an accurate syllogism: The Second Amendment exists to ensure that individuals can defend themselves against threats, whether from a corrupt government or felonious fellow citizens. Floridians are under threat from felonious fellow citizens who plan to take advantage of Ian’s destruction to loot homes and businesses. Therefore, Florida’s pro-Second Amendment stance will allow Floridians to defend themselves against criminals.

Image: Ron DeSantis. Twitter screen grab.

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