Thinking about the "Florida Loophole" after watching the newly released documentary 'Newtown'

This article was originally published on a now defunct progressive blog.  The repost tonight is in honor of the release of the documentary Newtown which chronicles the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook that took the lives of 20 children and 6 school teachers. 

Since I first penned the original post, Pennsylvania has taken steps to close the loophole in their own state so that their citizens cannot make use of Florida gun permit laws to purchase and carry weapons that their own state would not want them to be able to access.


Florida Gun Laws and Pennsylvania Politics…The “Florida Loophole”

Written by R.S. Pienta on 22 September 2010 —


It may be Florida’s Gun Law Loophole but right now it is Pennsylvania’s problem and it is that state’s law that has to be changed. Via what has been dubbed the “Florida Loophole”, Pennsylvanians with revoked concealed-carry gun permits re-arm themselves with relatively quick-and-easy permission from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

I started researching gun laws early last year as my part of an upcoming book from Demeter Press: You say you want a revolution?: The 21st century Motherhood Movement. I was asked to write about grassroots organizations formed by mothers. One of the groups I was assigned to study was the Million Mom March.

Prior to beginning my research, my knowledge about the NRA and their varied opponents was rudimentary. People are usually a bit surprised to hear that both of my grandmothers, lifelong Democrats, had concealed weapons permits and carried hand guns. I now own my maternal grandmother’s gun. However, I do not have a carry permit and the weapon is safely stored, unloaded.
I lived in New York until I was sixteen and Florida was the state where we vacationed and visited great-grandparents on Miami Beach. For me, it was the land of Miami Vice and Cocaine Cowboys. I once watched a drug bust in the alley behind my great-grandparents’ condo. I was washing dishes in the kitchen and had a great view from the window above the sink.

Family discussions before we decided to permanently move to Florida in the late 1980s included my father’s concerns about some of the Wild West aspects of the state’s character. He once said to my mom, “It is like they wear their six shooters on their hip down there, right out in the open.”
Mom’s reply at the time, “Isn’t the weapon you see better than the weapon you don’t see?”

These days, in Pennsylvania, it seems that voters would like to see fewer weapons period – especially weapons authorized by the state of Florida. The issue gained election-year attention after the Sept. 12 shooting of 18-year-old Irving Santana. Santana was shot 13 times and killed by a Hunting Park man who police said got his permit through the “Florida loophole” via the Internet.

In fact, if you want to figure out how to apply for your own gun permit in Florida but the Florida government site is perhaps a wee bit too official looking for you….just Google a few key search terms and you can find easy directions on sites such as “ehow”:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2064600_get-permit-carry-concealed-weapon.html

Here is a direct quote: “Florida is lenient in its application procedure to carry a concealed weapon and recognizes the right to self-defense.”

Read more: How to Get a Permit to Carry a Concealed Weapon in Florida | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_2064600_get-permit-carry-concealed-weapon.html#ixzz10G5cLP85 (9/22/2010)

The current furor over the “Florida loophole” was brought to my attention by a Pennsylvania mom. The Million Mom March was started by another mom – a mom from California. This mom, a woman named Mary Leigh Blek, lost her son Matthew on June 29 in 1994. He was attending college in New York. The fifteen year old who killed her son Matt got the gun via a street purchase. It was determined that the gun had been first purchased in a Southern state with more lenient gun laws and then sold illegally out of a car trunk in a New York City neighborhood.

I cried when Mary Leigh told me her story. We were talking by phone. She couldn’t see me wordlessly nod when she said, “If it happened to me, it could happen to you.”

What she said next, though, and what she has done in the sixteen years since her son’s murder, however, has been remarkable.

Mary Leigh continued, “The idea – the death of your child – is so sudden, so senseless, you want to stand on rooftops and shout so somebody else’s child gets to live.”

She first organized the Bell Campaign as a grassroots organization along the lines of Mothers Against Drunk Driving with the intent of organizing mothers against gun violence. The organization would later join forces with Donna Dees-Thomases’ Million Mom March group – Thomases’ own response to the mass shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center mass shooting in Granada Hills, California.


Later, the organizations would merge with the Brady Campaign. Today, Blek’s ongoing advocacy goals and work include bringing accountability into gun ownership and having a background check for all guns.