Florida’s MAIG Mayors – Either ignorant or trying to continue a long tradition of civil rights violations

After finding a badly outdated and incomplete list of Florida MAIG mayors at another blog I decided to spend some time on the Mayors Against ilLegal Guns website pulling up all of the current Florida mayors listed on their rolls there.  After that, getting their contact info was just a bit more research.

It has been widely reported that a number of mayors have left MAIG in recent months.  One of the latest to quit the group was Mayor John Tkazyik of Poughkeepsie, NY.  He had this to say:

 Nearly 50 pro-Second Amendment mayors have left the organization. They left for the same reason I did. MAIG became a vehicle for Bloomberg to promote his personal gun-control agenda — violating the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens and taking resources away from initiatives that could actually work to protect our neighborhoods and save precious lives. Gun control will actually make a bad situation worse.

As unlikely as it may seem to those of us who pay attention to Second Amendment issues, there may still be some Florida MAIG Mayors who have been mislead by lies fed to them by Bloomberg’s anti-gun group.  We have the emails sent to Florida Mayors from MAIG claiming that they support the Second Amendment, we even have emails from known anti-gun Police Chiefs and Sheriffs reassuring some mayors that MAIG is just “helping to target illegal guns, not legal gun owners”.

They may not have noticed that MAIG has opposed every pro-gun and pro-self-defense legislative initiative proposed in Florida and nationally since the group was founded.  It may have missed their radar that MAIG has supported the adoption of some of the most draconian anti-gun laws in this nation’s history.  Nobody may have told them about the “merger” of MAIG with the “Moms Demand Action” gun control group and the MAIG created “Shoot First” lobbying initiative that supports gutting Florida’s self-defense laws; Most egregiously trying to argue that you should even have a duty to retreat from your own home during a home invasion.

Then there are Mayors like Michael Ryan of Sunrise Florida who are  just rabidly against your right to own a firearm or defend your family.  Many of them are fully aware of what they are doing and just don’t care about your civil rights.

As you may have guessed, this is not the first time in Florida history that elected officials did everything they could to suppress the rights of people they didn’t like.  After all, Florida’s current carry licensing law traces directly back to its original enactment in 1893.  The current concealed carry licensing law comes from Florida’s first licensing law that was passed right after armed blacks stopped a lynch mob in Jacksonville Florida.  One of Florida’s first “Jim Crow” laws enacted after the civil war.

View Florida MAIG Mayors in a full screen map