Should the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law for gun owners be repealed? (Insert warning fanfare here) that is the question that stand-up philosopher and columnist Gary Stein ask the readers of the Sun Sentinel of Broward County, Florida. Then he starts with

The thing to remember about gun lovers is they hate any gun law. Any gun law.

Go on and read the article, it is loaded with the usual bovine manure proven wrong over and over. I am gonna write about something else:

Today I want to write about intellectuals but more specific about South Florida Intellectuals. You see, the South Florida intellectuals hate being in South Florida. That is why every other concept they spew is embedded with that word. A South Florida Intellectual is like a left wing associate professor teaching at a community college: He was never good enough to deal with real life so he had to go “teach” but he was never good enough to get tenure at a fancy University in the North East so he had to settle in a out-of-the-way college teaching an elective and scared that his next job will be in an Online “University” that advertises between Judge Judy and Divorce Court.

It is hard to be a South Florida Intellectual. To dress in the hip all-black It is almost suicidal in a 90+ degree weather and 700% humidity. Plus living in a heavily Latino community, it gets tiresome that seven out of ten acquaintances will stop you and ask you who in your family died and when is the funeral. And there is no way to look “intellectually” cool wearing a Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt or a guayabera, baby blue Bermuda shorts and Birkenstock sandals. South Florida Intellectuals know that sporting the ubiquitous Che Guevara T-shirt with so many Cubans around will assure them a beat down and a trip to the Seminole Reservation Alligator Pit where they will receive a free gator wrestling lessons without instructor.

There are few French restaurants here and they mostly cater to the northerners that come spend vacation time down here. Most fancy restaurants go under because their Cordon-Bleu Chefs refuse to serve black beans with every dish and the people here get pissed that the size of the portions are about half a Happy Meal without the toy. So the South Florida Intellectual must ingest mass quantities of pork, rice and fried platains even if he is hankering for blackened Imperial Japanese swordfish with a tofu vinaigrette on a plum & Cabernet wine sauce.

We also don’t do Art very well in South Florida. Few galleries and even fewer museums are available for a South Florida Intellectual to do an air-chin-hold and nod appreciatively as if “they get it” because there is always the brute who will declare loudly that he had better art hanging from the refrigerator door at his house fingerpainted by his 4 year old kindergartener. Hell, for most Floridians, Art Basel is a guy with a Honda Dealership in Hialeah.

And what really ranks a South Florida Intellectual is that we have guns of all kinds and shapes. We were the leaders of that awful Concealed Carry movement that swept the nation and we have more “assault weapons” per capita than the Chinese army. We are the test ground of most pro-gun initiatives and defied every single gloom and doom prognostications offered by the experts. The South Florida Intellectual cannot understand how come this hot and humid locale filled with Crackers, Cubans, Colombian, Hatians and every representative of this side of the Third World that live in such a weapons-heavy environment are not just murdering each other at the local Publix for that last piece of cassava or are roaming the streets in a tropical version of Mad Max after a hurricane in which they were supposed to come out as leaders of the uncouth masses and bring utopian peace to all.  Instead they live with more safety than their native Chicago or New York… and they really really hate that.