 A big issue facing this country is gun violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, over 28,000 people have died from gun violence since January 1st of 2023. There have been over 400 mass shootings. We definitely have a problem. After the mass shooting by white supremacists in Northwest Jacks this weekend, I've been thinking a lot about how do we unpack that tragedy. Over the next couple weeks, we're going to talk about history, white supremacy and other issues related to it, but today we are focusing on guns. Here to talk you through with me is Eric Friday, a Jacksonville-based trial attorney specializing in family and constitutional law with expertise in areas of firearms law and Second Amendment rights. He's both lead counsel and a registered lobbyist for Florida Carry Incorporated and joins us now in the studio. Eric, how are you? Thanks for having me. Well let's just set a little bit of a baseline here in the conversation. What is it that you believe about guns and the Second Amendment and how it affects society so to speak? Well, number one, we made a decision a long time ago in this country that the right to bear arms is a right that all citizens have. We've not always lived up to that, but I believe that that is the ultimate right that we have. It is the right that protects every other right we have. At the end of the day, you know, Frederick Douglass said we had several boxes that protected our liberty. We had the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. And that is as true today as it was when he said that. We started this country over the premise that the British soldiers marched to Lexington and Concord to seize the arms of the colonists, and we said no. And I see no reason to change that position today. All right. We're going to dive into that. And if you want to join the conversation, call 549-2937. You can tweet us at FCC on air. First goes connected, wjct.org, and you can find us on Facebook. So when I hear the Second Amendment and when people talk about the Second Amendment, sometimes I hear it spoken about in almost a religious zeal. People believe that the Second Amendment is the number one right that we have in the United States of America, and therefore everything else kind of falls under it. And I guess the question that I have is if it is the number one right, it feels like in many ways that we are being held hostage to the Second Amendment. If we are having like well over, we're in August, we're getting ready to hit September right now. And like I said, according to the Gun Violence Archive, over 400 mass shootings, that's a pretty big number. Well, there's a saying, figures lie and liars figure. To come up with 400 mass shootings, we have to include things like gang violence, which is a very disparate and definite separate thing from active killer situations. The solutions that we need for active killers like the Dollar General situation versus what we need to address gang violence are two very different things. The same solutions do not work for both, unless maybe your solution is that some people want to. I was about to say that we restrict, heavily restrict firearms. And the problem with that solution is this country is again, premised on we the people having that right, both for self-defense and to maintain a society where our government cannot become out of control. When you say it's a right that the Second Amendment gives that a right, it makes that a right. I'm wondering, let's just run down some other concepts here, right? Like, do you think housing is a right? There's no right to housing, no, sir. I mean, I would refresh. There's nothing in the Constitution that makes housing a right. I mean, I would argue that in the Constitution, it says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Correct. Everybody has a right to try and obtain housing. Everybody has a right to their industry and to be rewarded for their labor. No, you can't. The concept of rights does not entitle you to take something from someone else. And when you talk about a right to housing or a right to medical care, I think you run into that situation of, well, that compels somebody else's labor to help you. You just said, hold on, repeat that for me because I want to make sure I get this right. You said a right should not impede on somebody else. It should not compel somebody else to act for you. Right. So, because if the idea that a right is that like, because earlier you said, if a right does not basically, doesn't affect somebody else, but if you take my life with your right, you have definitely taken something from me. Having a right to bear arms does not give me a right to take anybody's life unless by their own actions, they forfeit their life. And it is the entire concept of self-defense, which is one of the penultimate rights of human beings to protect their own life from violence by others. How do you feel about automatic, not automatic weapons, but how do you feel about assault rifles? Well, I believe the very term you use, again, is a made-up term by an industry that wants to profit from and engage in a deprivation of civil rights from those who need those civil rights. Okay. So then let's do this, let's take it a different way. How do you feel about guns that can shoot a large amount of bullets, kill a lot of people very quickly versus like, say, a handgun? When I'm a store owner and a group of people is coming in to do me violence, I want the fastest-firing, most effective method of self-defense that I can obtain, and I want it in my possession for my use. So I do not believe in bans on any of these types of firearms. In this, our president likes to say that the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee you're right to own a cannon. Actually, it does. The Constitution, well, I'm going to explain that. The Constitution presumes the private ownership of warships, the letter of Mark provision in the Constitution. It presumes that private citizens would own ships capable of taking down other countries' naval vessels or shipping for purposes of aiding the war effort. So it does protect the right to own a cannon. It also protects the right to own better guns than the military does because the colonists themselves typically had better firearms than what was being issued to the general soldiers at the time because the American barrels were already starting to get rifled barrels, whereas the British were still using smoothbore muskets. So going by this logic that was laid out in the Constitution in the Second Amendment, which was very much about protecting democracy from the idea of if a dictator or somebody comes along, you want to have arms to fight against that. When I hear that type of language, all I can think about is January and the fact that we had a lot of people come to the capital and attempt to thwart democracy. And yes, like some of those people had guns, nobody fired, not that I know of, but still, like that's the type of action that that you're talking about when you say like that we have guns to, you know, overthrow if a dictator comes in into question. I mean, some people would call Joe Biden a dictator. I mean, obviously, like, I don't think that that's a fair assessment of him. But I'm just saying that, like, going by that logic, that would say that it's legal and fine for the type of things that we saw in January 6th. Well, I would say that, you know, Thomas Jefferson gave us a very good dissertation on when do we get there? I mean, like I just have I have when people go back to the founding fathers and they talk about what they say, like, when you say Thomas Jefferson, I think Thomas Jefferson enslaved his children. So for me, like listening to Thomas Jefferson as like an authority on any kind of morality just goes out the window. OK, so let's let's talk about why we have any gun control in Florida. The whole reason we have gun control in Florida is because approximately 500 black citizens prevented a lynching on July 4th, 1892, based on a conflict between a white man and a black man on the docks right down here where the landing used to be. It was a conflict. They got into a fight. The black gentleman killed the white man and he ended up in the Duval County Jail and a lynch mob formed. 500 armed blacks gathered on the street corners of Jacksonville and prevented that lynching. Ida B. Wells wrote about it and said that a Winchester repeater deserved a place of honor in every Afro-American home. And that would be the assault rifle at the time. And the next various next session, the Florida legislature passed a law to say that the Winchester repeater required a special license and guess who could get licenses and guess who couldn't get license. Sure. And like here's what I'll say is that like you don't have to go that far back to find when gun laws came into play because of African-Americans. You can go to California and look at Ronald Reagan and what he did in the state of California in in in an acting gun laws. So yeah, guns and race have always been tied together and gun laws have always not always, but gun laws have been put in place when black people show that they were willing to use to meet violence with violence. So yes, those gun laws have definitely been in place. I would argue that when black people have used weapons or have had weapons, they don't get the same protections that white people have regardless of the gun laws. You can look at like the gentleman who was pulled over, Belando Castile, he was a legal gun owner. He told the cops that he had a gun in his car and the cops still executed him and the NRA didn't say anything about it. I do not represent the NRA. Let's just be really clear about this. I'm just I'm just I'm just saying that like if we're going to if we're going to dive deeper into the idea of race that it's never been an equal playing field and that yes, those gun laws came from racist foundations, but half the laws in America came from racist foundations. And when we look at like gun laws and how they apply to today, it doesn't mean that we should throw it away because it has a racist foundation. It means that maybe we should look at like how look at how to move it into today's the way we see the world today and change and shift and make those guns or make those laws in a way that it serves the people. And I would say that like with the numbers that we're seeing, there's something broken there. And it may not be the laws, it may be something else, but I'm just saying there's something broken there. Well, I can fix a lot of the problems we have today. You know, the divisiveness in this country, we need to start licensing radio broadcasters and TV broadcasters and make sure that we background check those people really good to make sure they can't use the airwaves to foment into foment insurrection or to create distrust between various groups. I can end, I could help get rid of our crime problem in Jacksonville overnight. Just tell Sheriff Waters that the Sixth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, those are all suspended Sheriff. Sheriff Waters go out and do whatever you need to do, whatever action you feel you need to take to shut down crime in the city. He can do it. So, you would compare me on the microphone to somebody walking around with a loaded weapon and not having a license for it. I would compare the general concept of times change, but we have a right to free speech and just because the technology improves, doesn't mean we start restricting that right. Sure. You and I can keep going back and forth for a while, but I want to bring some listeners in. Sure. So, we're going to go to Susan and Frueco. Susan, how are you this morning? Good, thank you. Very good. Thank you. And thank you for taking my call. When I first started listening, I feel like it's a very good conversation because you're both listening to each other. But it started on a premise that I just wonder if there's another way to look at it. And that's the premise of right. And is right a demand or is it a gift? Susan, are you there? Well, we're just going to take that first question from Susan and I would say that a right is not a gift. I think that a right is what basically like what the consultation says and forgive me if I mess this up, but something along the lines of like that all human beings are given inalienable rights, right? Like that at birth. Well, the declaration, yeah, it says that. But the founding fathers were big on the concept of natural rights. And that is that there are certain rights that are inherent to us as human beings, as beings with free will and with brains. That did not extend to black people. I just feel like when we talk about the founding fathers, I think that you for me, right? You constantly have to put in the question of race because when we talk about history, people do not want to bring it in. And it's it's vastly important. Well, I would answer that with there were founding. There were members of the founding fathers who were abolitionists. There were members of the founding fathers who believed that that right needed to extend. But in a compromise and some unfortunate compromises or or fortunate compromises, depending on your view, they they compromise what they needed to do at the time to get a country created that could withstand and stand up to the some of the worst abuses of history. Some of the things that monarchs are doing around the world. And I believe we've we certainly haven't achieved what the ideals were. I would agree with that. I would just I think that what they wanted to set up was they wanted to set up a world where they were not victimized by what monarchs were doing around the rest of the world. But they absolutely did that to the poor, to the people that they enslaved and not just the people they enslaved, but also to poor people who were not landowners who were who could not, you know, control anything in this country. And so like there are some great, high minded ideals that the founding fathers put forward. I will not argue that point. Great ideals that a lot of them, the vast majority of them did not actually follow. And so when we talk about issues like the Second Amendment, to me like I cannot take race out of that. And you brought up the fact that gun laws were created, you know, basically to stop black people from meeting violence with violence. And I would argue that guns in this country, like the birth of it, the whole issue around guns in this country, comes from race. Because you had guns in the South to make sure that the population that you were enslaving stayed docile and did what you wanted them to do. That was undeniably, that was one of the uses of firearms in the South. Yeah, that and hunting and trapping and all of that stuff. And defense of your family from the Native population that at the time there was, you know, with the Native American wars. I think it is more important for us to try and achieve the ideal of being judged on the content of character rather than the color of skin. That that ideal is a higher ideal than ideals that restrict rights, that take away or impair the natural right of self-defense. Because if we don't have a right to our life, to protect our life and our families from violence, we have no rights. And going to the thing that brought us here today, this was less than six minutes that this thing occurred from 108 to 113. And I don't have the seconds. And he had a weapon. He had an AR-15. An AR-15, which is considered an assault rifle. I know you don't like that terminology, but it's considered a assault rifle. By some people who want to use that term, it's considered what they call an assault rifle. I don't know what that term is, except for it's a rifle that functions just like my hunting rifle, but it's different in color. Yeah, but your hunting rifle doesn't shoot off that many bullets a minute. Sure does. It does. As fast as I can pull the triggers. How fast that bolt cycles? But correct me if I'm wrong, with the AR-15, when you pull the trigger, several bullets come out. Not unless that gun was manufactured before 1986. You have a special tax stamp from the ATF to get it. No, the rifle that this gentleman used was a semi-automatic AR-15. It did not have automatic fat capabilities. They just don't. Okay, okay, okay, okay. I stand corrected. So continue what you were saying, though. So the, I'm sorry, I completely lost my train of thought. That's okay. Why don't we go to the folks? Because we got a lot of callers. We got Rob from Jewelington Creek. Rob, how are you doing this morning? I'm in and really appreciate the conversation. I appreciate the time I've been waiting for this topic to come back up again, because I've been wanting to ask a question. And my question is okay, fine. Supreme Court, especially after Heller, says we're allowed to rock around with pretty much any type of gun that we want, and what have you. That's what we live in. What about the ammunition? Is there anything that we can do to limit the type of ammunition, the strength of the ammunition? Just because you can walk around with an imitation M4, do you have to have the same type? Do we have to sell the same type of ammunition? But the military uses that just devours people's bodies when they go in. Can't we somehow nullify or make the ammunition a little bit weaker so that when you get hit with one of these shots from one of these rifles, it doesn't explode on the end, where the outshot isn't as big as the endshot or is bigger than the endshot. And I'll take my comments off the air. Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. Eric, I think you're against that, right? That's kind of a fallacy. I mean, it's something that people have heard in the news and people have heard that these are some kind of special bullets or something. They're not. If I brought in here the shot that I, what I hunt with, which is a .30-06, versus the round that a AR-15 shoots on the standard, which is a .223. Basically, it's a .22 versus a .30, in terms of how many points of an inch it is. So it's a much bigger round with much more powder behind it. It travels with much more impact when it hits a deer, for example. So that's number one, is we already have a ban on things like armor-piercing ammunition, okay? That's not legal. At the same time, do I want the proper ammunition to defend myself and my family with, based on the circumstances? Yes. What I use as a home defense gun might vary, depending on what I use in my vehicle, but depending on what type of, you know, situation I might find myself in. So I think there's a fallacy that we have some special ammunition that's out there at the military. We're using military-grade ammunition. Military-grade ammunition is made by the lowest bidder. Yeah. My target ammo is much more expensive. Let me ask you, we don't have a lot of time, and I want to bring you back on to, like, Talk to. Longer about this, but just from your point of view, what could have been done to stop what happened this last Saturday? One option is armed citizens have, they're their own first responders. When seconds count, the police are minutes away. It's not because our police aren't doing the best they can. So, you, like, I mean, whenever I hear that, like, all I can think of is, like, the Old West, and everybody walking around with guns on their hips, and that does not make me feel safe at all. If you study these people, these active killers, okay, that's the term I use for them, active killers, if you study them, most of them are after a score. They're after doing a better job than the last guy did. What deters them is knowing the risk of an armed response. That is the biggest thing that deters them. So, therefore, you don't have to have everybody with guns. You just have to have the fear that there's likely to be guns there is the big point. Yeah. Eric Friday is a lawyer and a lobbyist for Florida Carry Incorporated. He joined us to talk about gun violence. We did not have enough time to get a little bit deeper, but I'm going to have him back, and everybody that's calling you, you will have your chance to talk to him. I promise. Thank you so much, Mr. Friday, for coming in. Absolutely. Love doing it.