On September 10, Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeal looked at the state’s law against “open carry” of firearms, looked at the US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment, and noticed that the latter supersedes the former.

Five days later, Florida Attorney General James Uthmier issued “guidance to Florida’s prosecutors and law enforcement,” notifying them that “as of last week, open carry is the law of the state.”

Well, not “as of last week,” actually. Try “as of 1845,” the year Florida became a state. Per Madison v. Marbury, “an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void.” It just took a long time for the fake “law” to be noticed and nixed by a court.

Such a straightforwardly correct court ruling, and its relatively quick acceptance by a power-hungry politician whom one might expect to reflexively contest it, may seem strange even by Florida standards (interestingly, the now-common “Florida Man” phenomenon emerged a few months after I moved to the state … make of that what you will).

Even stranger, though, is the reaction I’m seeing from some hoplophobes — people who suffer from an irrational fear of guns — in Florida (and elsewhere, but let’s stick to Florida).

Yes, they’re scared, but that kind of goes with the whole “irrational fear” thing, doesn’t it?

For some reason, though, they say they’re MORE scared of “open carry” than of “concealed carry.” They’re more spooked by the thought of seeing a single 9mm pistol on someone’s belt at the grocery store than by the knowledge that there are 20 others, concealed inside jackets, purses, etc., in that same store.

Florida only recently became constitutionally compliant on “concealed carry” with the elimination of its permit requirement, but that permit system had already been in place for decades. Any time you’re in public in Florida — or in any of the other 49 states — there’s a good chance that someone within your visual field is packing a pistol inside his or her jacket, purse, etc.

If I suffered from an irrational fear of a ubiquitous inanimate object — more than 100 million Americans own more than half a billion guns; that only a tiny fraction of a single percent are ever used to kill people is what makes the fear so irrational — I’d much rather be able to see and avoid that object and those carrying it than live in constant knowledge that they’re probably all around me, all the time. Just sayin’ …

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s that no one should be murdered for speaking.

In the aftermath of Charlie “Prove Me Wrong” Kirk’s murder at a Utah campus event, it’s clear that no, we don’t all agree on that.

The bulk of responses to Kirk’s assassination consisted of:

1) Sober condemnations of murder in general, or murder over speech, from most people, and

2) Opportunistic condemnations of “political violence” from the most politically violent creatures on the planet, politicians.

But we also saw significant amounts of celebration among Kirk’s opponents, and baying for the blood of anyone not aligned with Kirk among Kirk’s supporters (some of whom on “the right,” it should be noted, were vehement critics right up until the instant the single shot rang out).

Not good. More and more Americans seem more and more willing lately to countenance the “political violence” that most Americans (including its politician practitioners)  still condemn.

Despite this last week’s fevered comparisons of the killing to the killings of JFK, RFK, MLK, and 3,000-plus people on 9/11, Kirk’s life and death, and his killer’s, are likely destined, within a few short years, to become the material of minor footnotes in dry historical texts.

Kirk and his killer are this past week’s, maybe this year’s, Brian Thompson and Luigi Mangione.

Yes, their notoriety will persist for more than the usual short news cycle, with bumps during associated court cases, etc., but none of them were so wildly noteworthy before their tragic interactions that they’ll be universally remembered a decade, let alone a century, hence.

That thought might comfort you.

It shouldn’t.

Last year, about 17,000 Americans were murdered.

How many of their names do you remember?

Do you consider “political violence” a differentiating factor worthy of closer attention than you’d give the victims of street robberies or domestic violence?

If so, ask yourself whether you’ve even heard names given to the 11 people politically murdered by the US government on a boat in the Caribbean on September 2.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve heard Lavoy Finicum’s name mentioned in the nine-year period starting about a month after his political murder by FBI agents in 2016, or Garrett Foster’s name mentioned in the last year, starting shortly after his political murderer was pardoned by Texas governor Greg Abbott.

Charlie Kirk’s name will fade from memory precisely because “political violence” is the not-so-new normal.

Personally, I’d prefer to live in a society where murder is so rare that we can remember every victim’s name whether the motive for the killing was “political” or not — and a society where the victim’s speech is never used as moral justification.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“The scientists get the patents,” US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick tells Axios.  “The universities get the patents. And the funder of $50 billion [in research leading to the patents], the US government, you know what we get? Zero. … The United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit.”

Put that way, it doesn’t sound so wrong, does it? But in reality, it’s piling a third bad idea on top of two others.

Explaining why “intellectual property” in general and patents in particular — the bottom layer of the poisonous three-layer policy cake — are bad ideas is a book-length, not op-ed length, endeavor. Suffice it to say that “intellectual property” ISN’T property, but rather a pernicious system of government-granted monopolies on ideas. If you want to dig into that claim, I recommend N. Stephan Kinsella’s book Against Intellectual Property (available free online from though, oddly, copyrighted by, the Ludwig von Mises Institute).

The middle layer is using taxpayer money to fund university research, then allowing the researchers and universities to patent, and realize revenue from, the results of that research.

It’s here that Lutnick is absolutely correct: If the government funds research, the taxpayers who funded the research should be the beneficiaries. The proper way to accomplish that is to put all results of government-funded research in the public domain. Goods produced using the research would be price-competitive because no single manufacturer would enjoy a monopoly on their production.

Lutnick’s proposal for a new top layer is bad all around.

The choice for universities would be to spend less on innovative research (incentivizing innovation is the go-to excuse for defenders of patent), charge more for the licenses on their patents, or (most likely) some combination.

Taxpayers still wouldn’t enjoy any choice in the matter. The combination they’d get out of the deal would be fewer new, worthwhile products AND higher prices for those products.

As for the federal government, the revenues would likely be a wash at best.  University patent revenues come to low single-digit billions of dollars per year. 50% of that would come to a fraction of what the federal government spends per DAY … and would likely be more than offset by the economic disincentives to innovation and production.

If the feds won’t eliminate patents and government research funding, they should at least eliminate any and all combinations of the two, rather than demanding their own taste of the racket’s revenues.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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