Get ready to be let down again by the Florida Republican Party.

[Miami_JBT]

We have 102 Republicans in office between the House and the Senate, and we can count the pro-gun bills that have been introduced on a single hand. This is unacceptable. These lawmakers campaign on a pro Second Amendment stance yet we have little to show for it. As Mr. T used to say, “I pity the fool.”

On Feb. 1, SB 498 was passed in committee by seven to four.

Five of the seven Republican lawmakers that voted in favor of SB 498 (CCW at Church) happen to vote in favor of SB 7026, the gun control legislation that was passed after the Parkland Shooting in 2018. Sen. Joe Gruters (R) even voted in favor of the Parkland gun control and he's the guy that introduced SB 498 this session. The current Speaker of the House and Senate President also voted in favor of the Parkland Gun Control bill.

Here are the Republicans from the Committee that voted on Monday.

Sen. Chair Jeff Brandes (R), Sen. Dennis Baxley (R), Sen. Jim Boyd (R), Sen. Jennifer Bradley (R), Sen. Doug Broxson (R), Sen. Debbie Mayfield (R), and Sen. Ray Rodrigues (R).

Here is their records from 2018 along with the Legislative Leadership (Rep. Chris Sprowls (R) & Sen. Wilton Simpson (R)) and the RPOF Chair (Sen. Joe Gruters (R)).





Yet Sen. Gruters is now introducing a Pro-Gun bill. Who is Sen. Gruters you ask? He’s the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. With 2022 election coming up, the Anti-Gun Republicans need to make their voting records look Pro Second Amendment. They’re trying to memory wipe the voter base to make it appear that they’re Pro-Gun.

SB 498 is going to next to the Criminal Justice Committee chaired by Sen. Jason Pizzo (D). Who is Sen. Pizzo is a freshman senator? Prior to him holding office, he was an Assistant State Attorney in Miami-Dade. The fact that Senate President Wilton Simpson (R) selected him to chair the committee as a freshman senator says either Pizzo has political pull from an unknown source of power, or he's the selected stool pigeon to take the blame for blocking Pro-Gun legislation. Senate President Simpson didn’t become the Senate President without the guiding hand of the Republican Party of Florida, which is now chaired by Sen. Gruters.

We continue to see the same, repeated pattern over the last ten years, where pro-gun bills die in committee at the hands of people like Sen. Anitere Flores (R), Rep. Dane Eagle (R), Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla (R), Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff (R), and others. They were all the selected stool pigeons tasked to kill Pro-Gun bills. But, this year it seems the Anti-Gun Republicans use a different tactic. This time they’ll use an Anti-Gun Democrat to  kill the bill. Why? Because it will protect their reputations if they can shift the blame to the Democrats.

Florida is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some Republican lawmakers believe that gun owners’ votes can be taken for granted when faced with a choice between them and an anti-gun Democrat. It’s the old game of “the lesser of two evils.”  Sen. Baxley, the only Senator that voted in favor of SB 498 and that voted against SB 7026 back in 2018 told me as much back in 2019:

"Republican Lawmakers don't support pro-gun legislation because they don't hear any negative criticism from their constituency. They take the silence of gun owners as approval."

Until gun owners actually make noise, the RPOF and its members in the Legislature will turn a deaf ear towards the Second Amendment. You must be loud, proud, and ACTIVE!

Sadly, I have not a word from Gov. DeSantis either.

Governor DeSantis, during the 2018 Republican Party of Florida's Sunshine Summit, openly stated that if he were Governor at the time, he’d have vetoed SB 7026. The Gun Control legislation that was passed by a Republican Supermajority Legislature and signed into law by then Republican Governor and now Senator Rick Scott. We are now in 2021 and he's yet to use his office as a bully pulpit to support Pro-Gun legislation.

Currently, Rep. Sabatini’s Pro-Gun bills (Campus Carry, Constitutional Carry, and the Repeal of the ban of ammo/gun sales during declared states of emergency) are languishing in the House and the only Pro-Gun bill in the Senate is going to a Committee chaired by a Democrat.

Governor DeSantis has yet to openly speak in support of the Second Amendment since he has taken office.

As Floridians, we should be excelling in defending that right, yet for the past decade we have been falling behind. Our state was once known as the “Gunshine State”. A state that was proud in being proactive in expanding the rights of Floridians. The arguments that the Gun Grabbers have claimed have been proven false. Sixteen states currently have Constitutional Carry. Forty-five states have Open Carry. Ten States have Campus Carry. Blood is not flowing in the streets and crime has not skyrocketed.

I voted for DeSantis in 2018 specifically because he championed himself to be a strong defender of the Second Amendment. He took a stronger stance on that issue even during the Primary Election and openly stated that he’d veto Anti-Gun Legislation and push for Pro-Gun Legislation while Adam Putnam (then Florida Commissioner of Agriculture & Consumer Services) didn’t.

But since November of 2018, all I've heard is crickets.

[Flame Red]

Not to excuse them in any way shape or form, as you are right I think. But I think all Repubs are fearful of being canceled given the cheated election and the overwhelming number of Libiturds that escaped from NY and invaded Florida and Texas and will continue to vote for the brain dead zombie libiturds that they ran away from.

I think they expect Beto's gun grabbers to knocking shortly after the next mass shooting.

Not that I expect they will resist.

[Odessaman]

Need to get some competent, pro-2A challengers to primary their self-serving asses out of office. Fool me once, shame on you, as they say.

[Chigger]

These republicans have been doing this for years long before this past election fiasco.

All politicians lie to get in office and if you don't understand how the political system works you'll get upset everytime.
Unless you wipe away the legislature with one fell swoop, a few well meaning rookie politicians will be treading water without anyone throwing a lifeline.

You don't get the party backing unless you promise deal making ahead of time.

The time for action was years ago, it's too late. Politicians aren't afraid of voters anymore because a Republican who's a bag of dicks and running for reelection has little chance that the party will support a primary opponent and most voters will vote for them anyways. (Brian Mast comes to mind)

Now you can chose not to vote for them or cross party lines, but all that does is elect someone much worse.

No, you'll take what they give you and swallow it.

[MiamiOffshore]

[quote="Flame Red" post_id=36404 time=1612386291 user_id=244]
Not to excuse them in any way shape or form, as you are right I think. But I think all Repubs are fearful of being canceled given the cheated election and the overwhelming number of Libiturds that escaped from NY and invaded Florida

MUST play to WIN instead of playing not to lose!

[Miami_JBT]

Not to excuse them in any way shape or form, as you are right I think. But I think all Repubs are fearful of being canceled given the cheated election and the overwhelming number of Libiturds that escaped from NY and invaded Florida and Texas and will continue to vote for the brain dead zombie libiturds that they ran away from.

I think they expect Beto's gun grabbers to knocking shortly after the next mass shooting.

Not that I expect they will resist.

They were doing it before Biden. Hell, Republicans in FL went stupid with Red Flag Laws.

[Chigger]

Here is a letter penned by George Orwell sent in 1944 to one Noel Willmett, who had asked “whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade” given “that they are not apparently growing in [England] and the USA”:

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.

Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell

Three years later, Orwell would write 1984.

He sure pegged our number. 2 and 2 are indeed 5 nowadays. Gender neutral is a prime example among others.

Obama and Trump hardcore followers indeed fall under the follow the fuhrer brown shirts losing site that the gov't is more than just one figurehead.

[dammitgriff]

Thanks, JBT. Well-informed is well-armed.

Excellent post, Chigger. Could you point to the source on the ‘net, please?

R/Griff

[Chigger]

George Orwell: A Life in Letters
by George Orwell (Author), Peter Davison (Editor)

Available at Amazon or other book stores.

[revelation]

Mayfield was a shock to me. Indian River County is still such a good ole' boy county. I hate to say it but I am afraid her husband Stan, Representative in the Florida House, is turning over in his grave.