I remember when Florida passed permitless carry back in 2023. The anti-gun crowd lost their minds. Shannon Watts called it 'dangerous.' Debbie Mucarsel-Powell said DeSantis 'made Florida less safe.' These are the same folks who've been predicting doom and gloom every time we expand our Second Amendment rights for the past 40 years.
Well, here's some news that won't make it onto their fundraising emails: gun-involved homicides dropped 11% in Florida between 2015 and 2024. That's according to Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions — hardly a friend of gun owners, since it's Michael Bloomberg's pet project. Even they couldn't spin this data to support more gun control.
And it's not just Florida. The states with the lowest gun-involved homicide rates read like a who's who of permitless carry: New Hampshire, Vermont, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and North Dakota. Meanwhile, states with the strictest gun laws keep seeing violence rise. You don't have to be a statistician to see the pattern here.
The Hopkins report tries to save face by still claiming that carrying guns 'poses a serious threat to safety,' but the numbers don't lie. Violent crime has been trending down for decades while states have been making it easier to exercise our right to bear arms. Maryland saw a four-fold increase in carry permits after they were forced to scrap their 'may issue' scheme following the Bruen decision, and they had one of the biggest declines in gun-involved deaths.
Now here's what the hoplophobes won't talk about: about 70% of gun-involved deaths in Florida are suicides. That's a mental health crisis, not a gun crisis. You can't fix that by passing more laws that punish lawful owners. Groups like Hold My Guns and Walk the Talk America are doing the real work here — offering voluntary safe storage options and fighting the stigma around mental health treatment.
The bottom line is simple: permitless carry didn't turn Florida into the wild west. It didn't increase crime. It did exactly what we knew it would do — let law-abiding citizens exercise their constitutional rights without jumping through bureaucratic hoops. The doomsayers were wrong then, and they'll be wrong the next time they cry wolf about any expansion of our freedoms.
The data speaks for itself. More freedom works. More gun control doesn't.