At the movie theater.

The trailers keep giving me chills.

Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried on Tuesday suspended concealed carry weapons permits for Floridians arrested for involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
…
“The deeply disturbing events that occurred at our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6 were sedition, treason and domestic terrorism — and those individuals involved in the insurrection must be held accountable for attempting to subvert our democratic process,” Fried said.

“Since charges began being filed, we are using our lawful authority to immediately suspend the licenses of 22 individuals involved in the storming of the U.S. Capitol. This is an ongoing effort, and as charges and sentences continue in the wake of this despicable attack, we will further suspend and revoke any additional licenses granted to insurrectionists.”

Nikki Fried suspends concealed carry permits for alleged insurrectionists (floridapolitics.com)

And legally yes, she can suspend licenses but she cannot revoke them just yet, no matter how much she would love to. For that, she needs a conviction and we are not even close to that.

Florida Statutes 790.06 (3)

The department shall, upon notification by a law enforcement agency, a court, or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and subsequent written verification, suspend a license or the processing of an application for a license if the licensee or applicant is arrested or formally charged with a crime that would disqualify such person from having a license under this section, until final disposition of the case.

There is no doubt that the FBI contacted FDLE regarding pressing charges against Florida “Insurrectos” so it is their duty follow the law and notify the Queen of Tropical Botox about them.

There is no doubt she is too gleeful about finally striking once against Florida’s CWL after all this time in office. And it is disturbing but not unexpected that she hitched her little red wagon to this imbecilic insurrection joke as a way to prop her failing chances to run as Democratic Candidate for Florida’s Governorship.

But I want to remind everyone that she is where she is because she was allowed to be voted in. She ran with the hint of a promise of legalizing pot while the rest ignored her.

Elections have consequences.

President Joe Biden says that federal workers who are not vaccinated are not smart.

Joe Biden insults unvaccinated Americans: "You're not nearly as smart as I thought you were" pic.twitter.com/KsMCPY90yp

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 27, 2021

Remember that Joe Biden said that Hunter Biden was “the smartest guy I know.”

This is Hunter Biden, the smartest guy our President knows, smoking crack cocaine on a webcam during a conversation with an unknown woman about going to therapy.

So I don’t think Joe has much credibility when it comes to deciding who is and who isn’t smart.

What I do know is that questioning the intelligence of the rocket scientists and engineers I know at NASA, the Missle Defense Agency, and the other high-tech organizations in the Huntsville area was not taken well.  I have heard from them.

I have a feeling that similar sentiments are coming out of other government labs.

It was announced shortly after this question that Biden will force federal employees and contractors to get vaccinated or suffer the indignity of regular testing and mitigation requirements.

Get the vaccine or have a swab jammed up your nose halfway to your brain every couple of weeks while being subjected to full-time masking while at work.

Insult to injury.

Maybe the purpose of this was to encourage another ideological purge from our space and defense sectors, or maybe it wasn’t, but that is what is going to happen.

This guy:

Is this guy:

Why is murder an appropriate response to property damage but property damage isn't an appropriate response to murder?

— Harry Dunn (@libradunn) August 28, 2020

And the screenshot just in case:

The guy who is testifying about how bad the storming of the Capitol was is the same guy who supported the multiple-day long rioting, looting, and arson of Kenosha.

Fuck his opinion, he’s a partisan hack.

This is the Florida Agriculture Commissioner and the woman who wants to replace DeSantis as Governor.

I just suspended the concealed weapons permits of 22 people involved in the insurrection against the United States of America instigated by Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.

— Nikki Fried (@NikkiFried) July 27, 2021

She is gloating about suspending Foridian’s concealed weapons permits.

According to The Hill:

Fried’s office did not specify which individuals would have their concealed carry licenses suspended, but so far, dozens of Floridians have been arrested in connection with the riot.

The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ Division of Licensing oversees the state’s concealed carry licensing program and has the ability to suspend a permit if an individual is charged with a felony or other disqualifying offense.

So we don’t know who these people are or what they have been charged with, so we do not know if their permit suspension is within the color of the law or if this is Fried abusing her power for grandstanding politics as the Democrats rally around the narrative that the January 6th kerfuffle was worse than the Civil War, War of 1812, Bombing of Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 combined.

And even if these suspensions are within the limits of the law, the fact that Fried went to Twitter to brag about it overwhelmingly implies she’s doing it for partisan hack reasons.

Even if these 22 people deserved to have their permits suspended due to the nature of the charges against them, Fried’s grandstanding is wholly irresponsible and casts doubt on the legitimacy of her actions.

In one Tweet, Fried has made the Florida CCW system – perhaps the most respected CCW system in the country – a corrupt and partisan enterprise.

There is a way to fix this, and that is Constitutional Carry.  If it doesn’t require a permit to carry, a partisan politician can’t gloat about pulling your permit.

This is a follow-up to a post from a few days ago, New York public defenders cause hell to freeze over.

Does the Progressive Case Against New York’s Concealed Carry Ban Hold Water?

In its coming term, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to New York’s restrictive concealed carry laws, which effectively ban most civilians from carrying a concealed weapon in public. Many conservative organizations and Republican politicians have filed amicus briefs urging the justices to strike down New York’s stringent regime as a violation of the Second Amendment. Not everyone opposed to the state’s gun laws, however, are on the right. An amicus brief filed by a coalition of traditionally progressive public defender and legal aid groups—including Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, and the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid—asked the Supreme Court to legalize concealed carry as a matter of racial justice. Citing police abuse of Black and Hispanic individuals who possess firearms, these groups wrote that New York law enforcement seeks to “criminalize gun ownership by racial and ethnic minorities,” adding: “The consequences for our clients are brutal.”

I covered this, and I agree with the Defender’s Unions.  A corrupt, may issue, permit system that denies people who are not wealthy and well-connected gun rights is absolutely racist and used by the NYPD to brutalize people.

Many conservatives eagerly welcomed their new bedfellows, while the reaction on the left was mixed. Writing in the Nation, Elie Mystal acknowledged the disparate impact of gun restrictions on Black Americans but pointed to studies showing that more permissive gun laws are “going to get more people, specifically Black people, killed.”

Except that one line from one of the studies mentioned blows their whole argument out of the water.

The major implication of this finding is that criminal justice practitioners should prioritize strict permitting laws and laws to keep guns out of the hands of people convicted of a violent crime over banning select types of weapons.

Slate is conflating criminals with guns and law-abiding people with permits with guns.

This challenge is to New York’s permitting process, effectively wanting it to be shall issue.  Every person, black, white, and otherwise, who would get a permit and a gun if the Supreme Courts strikes down the New York law would pass a background check.  So only law-abiding citizens would have more access to guns.

The only threat to black people in this decision would be to black criminals who attack lawful CCW permit holders.

To better understand the impulses behind the brief, as well as the historical intersection of racism and gun control, I spoke to Carol Anderson, a renowned scholar and professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Anderson’s most recent book, The Second, argues that the Second Amendment was motivated by white fear of Black Americans. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is bullshit.  This is a Critical Race Theory view of the Second Amendment.

My wife got me the book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.  Racists and the Klan were all about disarming blacks.  Gun rights protected them.  The Second Amendment belongs to black people just as much as any other citizen.

The application of the law toward Black people is so disparate. That’s what you saw with stop and frisk, where the bulk of the folks who were stopped and frisked were Black and brown. Your Blackness automatically makes you inherently criminal. That language comes out of the 1740 Negro Act in South Carolina. This is built into American society, and it’s what has to be dismantled. When you are seeing this disparate policing, you are seeing anti-Blackness.

That is what they are laying out in that first part of that brief: the anti-Blackness that courses through policing that criminalizes Black folk for doing what white folk do. So what they’re asking is to stop the criminalization of that activity. But that leads to greater access to guns. And greater access to guns has not made Black folks secure. It is the Gordian knot, the conundrum that says: You’re either going to be criminalized by the NYPD or you’re going to face the vulnerability of knowing that there are so many people walking around you with guns that the least little thing can get you shot. Road rage. Bumping into somebody wrong on the subway. We know that folks are raw right now. More guns doesn’t make us safer.

This anti-Blackness in American society has provided Black people with a Hobson’s choice. If you bear arms, you run up against the policing that criminalizes you and sees you as an automatic threat. You run up against individuals who define you as an automatic threat and believe that they have the right to gun you down. This is what we see with “stand your ground” laws. When whites kill Blacks under “stand your ground,” they’re ten times more likely to walk than when Blacks kill whites.

Isn’t it convenient that a grievance monger has figured out how to make both gun rights and gun restrictions racist?

I agree that the severe restrictions are racist.

There are law-abiding black citizens of New York who live in crime-filled areas and want guns to defend themselves.  Not granting them permits is racist against them and gets them killed.

The second half of his thesis is the old “there will be blood in the streets” argument against concealed carry that they always pull out and never materializes.

White people with permits will not gun down innocent black people with their newly expanded gun rights.  We didn’t see that in any city or state, including Chicago, where CCW rights increased.

The only people at risk are criminals, and I fundamentally do not care about the lives of criminals.  I want to grant law-abiding citizens of all races the right to defend themselves and the right to carry a weapon to do so.  The duty is to protect innocent life.

But this sort of mental gymnastics allows them to be critical of everything and accuse everything of being racist without proposing a solution to the problem of a corrupt gun permitting system, and rising crime amid absent police.

Going to shall issue fixes both of those problems, and if some gang member gets shot for his troubles while committing a violent crime, I don’t give a fuck, as long as an innocent person goes home alive, instead of vice versa.

This is what we saw in Chicago and this is what we will see in New York.

But the grifters have to grift.

…but not without one last moment.

The driver came to pick up the empty container and the engine that runs the hydraulics and mechanicals of the lifter ran out of gas in mid lift.

And, of course, she had no gas left so I gave her a quick lift to a gas station not far from the house.

After that, all went well and she parted with the container.

I officially declare the move successful… till I find out if something broke during the trip.