Smart Judge Slaps Down Federal Overreach

Well this is interesting.

A Florida federal judge has put an end to the government’s bizarre ban on bringing firearms into post offices.

This law is stupid. I have taken loaded pistols into hospitals and banks, and I have kept guns in vehicles on university property. I have carried in parks where little children play. I carried in church; as a security team member, I was required to carry. I carry in restaurants with big bars. No one cares. It’s legal. Why are federal buildings set apart?

If I were a criminal, I would carry wherever I wanted, unless I were subject to search. Idiotic, inexplicable, arbitrary, pointless laws wouldn’t stop me. Neither would good laws. The ban didn’t stop bad people, but it inconvenienced good people and put them in danger.

We used to joke a lot about “going postal,” but the truth is that a post office is not a very dangerous place, nor is it a place that is especially appealing to criminals. Post offices aren’t full of good stuff criminals want. It’s not like masked collectors in stolen hoopties are storming post offices to get the latest Disney stamps.

Committing a crime in a post office can put the federal police on your back, and they are much worse than state cops. You’ll have the Postal Inspector’s agency and the FBI to deal with, and they don’t have to worry about state lines or extradition.

Here in Florida, under state law, we can carry in banks, churches, and hospitals. There are dangerous restrictions on several types of places and events. Bars, schools, sporting events, career centers (???), polls, government meetings, jails and prisons, police stations, courtrooms, airports, and places that fall into the same big category as whorehouses. There used to be a law saying you couldn’t go into hospitals with certain types of mental facilities, but it looks like it’s gone now.

The post office ban is federal. The state doesn’t care. The ban also applies to other federal buildings.

Let’s start with bars. It’s silly to keep guns out of bars, because bars are places where innocent, sober people are likely to be attacked. There is a separate law banning carrying a firearm while drunk, so if the ban on bar carry was removed, drunks would still have to leave their guns outside.

The ostensible purpose of the bar ban is to keep drunks from carrying weapons in bars, but since that law is redundant, the only effect of the law is to disarm sober people who may be attacked by drunks. Bartenders, waitresses, bouncers who keep belligerent people out, people whose current or former romantic partners may want to barge in and shoot them, and so on.

The unspoken purpose of the law is probably to allow drunks to beat people up, because legislators thought that was better than having righteous shootings in bars. Many people who have an irrational hatred of guns think it’s better for innocent people to be beaten and severely hurt than it is for victims to shoot assailants.

I understand why legislators wanted to keep guns away from professional sports events, because people are idiots about sports. They beat up Little League umpires. But the actual effect of the law is to leave innocent people at the mercy of bigger, stronger people who can’t behave like adults. Seems to me an umpire should be allowed and encouraged to carry.

Why there would be a ban on carrying a gun in a career center is beyond me. I have never seen a career center. I assume it’s a place where people go to find jobs. Googling, I see there are 12 career centers, and they are connected with public universities.

Are people likely to flip out when career advisors tell them they should be in waste management instead of neurosurgery? Has anyone ever heard of a shooting in a career center? Makes no sense to me.

The school ban is just plain insane. High schools and universities are full of women at their peak physical attractiveness, and we disarm them. Brilliant. They should call it the Ted Bundy Law.

The ban doesn’t seem to work well on school shooters, but it makes things a lot easier for them.

Keeping firearms away from polls seems archaic. With the exception of the well-known case of the Pennsylvania New Black Panthers who used a wooden billy to menace whites at a poll while shouting racist remarks and threats, we don’t hear about weapons at polls, or poll violence, any more, even though people are perfectly capable of beating each other up and killing each other at polls without weapons.

Keeping guns out of courtrooms makes a certain amount of sense, because courtrooms host divorces, domestic violence cases, and all sorts of criminal cases. I was in a courtroom when a murderer’s dad threatened to kill a detective. But the restriction should not apply to lawyers or court employees. Judges can carry. Cops and bailiffs carry. Why not lawyers? We’re officers of the courts. A lot of lawyers get attacked by moron clients, and courthouses tend to be situated in high-crime, Democrat-controlled areas.

When I used to practice, courthouses didn’t have gun check rooms. I doubt they have them now. I had to take long walks through downtown Miami without a pistol. The law wasn’t fair to me. It certainly wasn’t fair to all the ladies who worked in the building.

Keeping guns out of government meetings doesn’t make much sense to me. Violence at government meetings is rare.

Prisons and police stations…no complaints from me. The corrections officers and cops are armed. That’s enough. They provide a good deterrent, unlike a 70-year-old judge armed with a 5-shot, sweat-rusted .38 he doesn’t know how to shoot. People have a long history of smuggling guns into prisons for bad reasons, and prisons are full of people who have no civil rights, so we should keep guns out.

I think keeping guns out of police stations is stupid, because no one takes a gun to a police station in order to fight the police–no one a ban would stop–but the law seems harmless because police stations are very safe.

Airports? Why? There are no metal detectors at airport entrances, so obviously, they are already full of illegal guns. Not much happens. You can’t hijack an airport. If you’re going to take a hostage at an airport and use him to get yourself a plane, you can do it from the sidewalk, where guns are allowed. I don’t get it.

I had to stay at an airport hotel once. If I had walked in through an entrance that opened into the terminal, I would have had to leave my gun in my car or put it in a suitcase. Hotels are pretty dangerous. Connie Francis was raped twice in hotels.

The bar restriction has unintended consequences. It means there are a lot of restaurants where you can’t pee. Restaurants with busy bars often put their restrooms in bar areas. I can go to Friday’s with a gun, but I have to sit outside the bar area, and if the can is in the bar, I have to put my gun in my car before I can use the facilities.

That’s really stupid. Even if it were a bad idea to let people carry in bars, it should be okay to let someone zip into and out of the restroom without disarming.

I’ve had to tell hostesses not to seat me in bar areas. I guess they thought I was an alcoholic.

As for post offices, my big problem is that when I go, and I obey the law by putting my Glock and knife in my center console, I forget my weapons are in the car. Then I end up walking around half the day disarmed.

I could just keep my gun and knife on me and go in anyway, because they don’t check. I could have done it already, multiple times, without problems. I could have walked into the area where the drop slots are, fully armed, dropped my envelopes, and walked out. But it would have been very naughty.

Now it’s legal, at least until the decision striking down the law is appealed. And if anyone violated the law in the past, they can’t be charged with anything.

If the post office restriction is gone, then the other blanket restriction on federal facilities is presumably on life support. The same rationale for striking it down applies.

A right you can only exercise in little bits of your state is not much of a right. What if we said blacks could be banned from restaurants within a thousand feet of schools? What if we said you could only object to random searches in a few designated areas? People wouldn’t like these laws much. The right–not privilege–to carry is at least as important as other civil rights. We shouldn’t let tyrants nibble away at it.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll stroll into the Post Office fully armed and buy some stamps. My little salute to Rosa Parks.