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Florida neglects gun threat

Florida allows 410,000 people to conceal weapons in public, but the guns themselves may not be the worst of the state's secrets. The other hidden outrage, now revealed by reporters from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is that criminals are on the list. Criminals such as Robert Rodriguez, a Tampa bar owner who twice has been convicted of shooting a gun, are licensed to carried concealed weapons.

As matters of public safety go, this one is unthinkable. How can Florida give criminals the explicit permission to hide guns in public?

The Sun-Sentinel attributed the licensing practices to a combination of lax legislation, glaring loopholes, sloppy communications between the licensing agency and law enforcement, and negligence. The newspaper's tote board for questionable concealed weapons licenses is indeed a frightening one: 1,400 people who had pleaded guilty or no contest to felonies, 216 with outstanding warrants, 128 with active domestic violence injunctions, and six registered sex offenders.

In the face of such failure, state licensing director W.H. "Buddy" Bevis was remarkably unmoved. "I don't know of a systemic problem," he told the Sun-Sentinel. "I know of problems here and there."

Here and there?

How about the Pembroke Pines man who shot his girlfriend while she cooked breakfast? How about the Lake Worth man who punctuated an argument with his roommate by holding a revolver to his head? How about the Tampa pizza deliveryman who was being hunted by police in the shooting of a teenage boy? How about Rodriguez, the Tampa bar owner with 22 prior arrests?

All of these men were either granted or allowed to keep concealed weapons permits. Which ones would Bevis like to defend as merely "here and there"?

The Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, headed by Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, oversees the weapons program. But its seeming indifference is only part of the problem. Two decades after Florida lawmakers wrote one of the most permissive concealed weapons laws in the nation, the politicians are only too eager to look the other way.

Incredibly, that is precisely the action legislators took last year on concealed weapons. They voted, at the behest of the NRA, to remove concealed weapons permits from the public record.

The Sun-Sentinel report, in fact, was based on the last publicly available list of weapons permits, prior to the July 1 deadline. As for which criminals have received permits since that time, the public may never know.

The current law, combined with the new provision for secrecy of records, is an affront to the law enforcement agencies that opposed it in 1987.

At that time, many county commissions and sheriffs had tougher measures in place for people who sought to carry concealed weapons, so the NRA went to Tallahassee. In the Capitol, lawmakers passed a state law that pre-empted local measures and set the bar so low that only two states are more permissive in granting licenses. Not surprisingly, the number has soared, from roughly 25,000 in 1987 to 410,000 last year.

Easier access to hidden guns was sold with ironclad assurances to concerned residents and police agencies. The permits would be issued only to, in the words of the NRA, "law-abiding citizens." That's now been revealed as a lie, and here is how one sheriff, Joey Dobson of Baker County, reacted to the Sun-Sentinel findings.

"I had no idea," said Dobson, who also serves on an advisory panel for state licensing. "I think the system, somewhere down the line, is broken. I guarantee you the ordinary person doesn't know (that) ... and I'd venture to guess that 160 legislators in Florida don't know that, either."

The 160 lawmakers will get a chance, when they open their regular session in March, to demonstrate whether they too have been left in the dark. They'll have a chance to voice their alarm, to demand an investigation and to seek changes in the law. If they don't, then consider them all accessories after the fact - accessories to criminals with concealed guns.

[Last modified January 29, 2007, 21:52:38]