As the Jan. 6 commission show trials began this week in Washington, D.C., the lone Democrat on Florida’s otherwise Republican-dominated state cabinet took the opportunity to make a highly politicized attack on the individual rights of those arrested for their involvement with the incursion on Capitol Hill.
Agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried announced on Tuesday, as House select committee hearings on the Capitol incursion kicked off, that she would be revoking the concealed carry licenses of individuals “involved” in the attack.
“The deeply disturbing events that occurred at our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6 were sedition, treason and domestic terrorism — and those individuals involved in the insurrection must be held accountable for attempting to subvert our democratic process,” Fried said in a statement, according to the Citizen Free Press.
“Since charges began being filed, we are using our lawful authority to immediately suspend the licenses of 22 individuals involved in the storming of the U.S. Capitol. This is an ongoing effort, and as charges and sentences continue in the wake of this attack, we will further suspend and revoke any additional licenses granted to insurrectionists.”
Fried does indeed have the authority to revoke concealed carry licenses for individuals charged with felony crimes, as the Division of Licensing falls under the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ purview, according to Just the News.
However, her statement notably lacked the words “charged with” or “convicted of,” and she did not specify if the 22 individuals from whom she is stripping the right to concealed carry a firearm were even the individuals she has the legal authority to deprive of such a right.
What’s more, no one who has been charged for their actions on Jan. 6 has been charged with treason or sedition.
Fried’s misleading comments and dubiously constitutional actions are incredibly chilling and should concern any American with even the remotest regard for due process and our constitutional protections.
As Florida Politics noted, Fried is not allowed to release the names of the individuals whose licenses she has revoked and charges have not yet been announced for many of the individuals accused of being involved in the incursion. Many of them do, indeed, hail from the Sunshine State and are vocal advocates for gun rights.
According to Just the News, it is not clear if Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has the authority to reinstate concealed carry licenses for these individuals.
Fried, as it happens, is also the leading Democratic contender in Florida’s 2022 gubernatorial race.
So let that sink in — this woman has just smeared innocent-until-proven-guilty Floridians as terrorists, insurrectionists and seditionists who attempted to “subvert our democratic process.”
And she likely did it all for optics. After all, she’s using all the same terms that the Washington, D.C., Democrats and the media alike have employed to paint a picture of a band of cold, calculated, domestic terrorists.
That’s what this whole thing has been about. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of the people who gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 were there to protest peacefully and did exactly this.
It doesn’t matter that the majority of those who managed to break into the Capitol building — certainly a criminal act, we can all agree — mostly just snapped selfies and walked around in a jubilant daze.
They’re being treated like, well, exactly what they are: political prisoners of an increasingly totalitarian government which has no problem depriving them of their basic rights, like access to council and humane prison conditions, as the attorneys of those currently awaiting trial have alleged.
Meanwhile, the Jan. 6 House panel has been weighed with members of Congress who share Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hyper-partisan rhetoric on the attacks, depriving the minority party of the opportunity to appoint members who would have provided the much-needed balance to the undeniable bias of those she’s appointed.
Now, those accused of being involved with the incursion into the Capitol — accused — are being stripped of their Second Amendment rights as well, and Fried is doing it all to virtue signal to the totalitarian left that she’s completely on board with this targeted and political attack.
This has always been the danger of such a decidedly partisan approach to investigating a series of events that the vast majority of Americans likely didn’t support. It would be one thing if they were just using hysterical language — but they’re not. It looks as though they’re actually taking rights away from Americans who have yet to be proven guilty of a crime which would result in the deprivation of these rights to begin with.
What’s next? One shudders to imagine.
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