We really are the Gunshine State now, according to our attorney general. Open carry ban will no longer be enforced

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The Gunsmoke culture

It is now officially the Wild West in the Gunshine State.

Pistols and holsters are in vogue, and cops have been warned not to pester openly armed Florida men and women.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent guidance to all the state’s law enforcement agencies and prosecutors this week, instructing them to stop enforcing a law that bans the open carry of firearms.

Questions had arisen in the wake of an earlier appeals court ruling that the 1987 Florida statute that banned unconcealed weapons was unconstitutional. What were cops and prosecutors supposed to do?

Do nothing, the A.G. advised. Stop enforcing the law. From now on, he said, “Open carry is the law of the state.”

As reported in the Tallahassee Democrat:

Last week, a three-judge panel in the 1st District Court of Appeal declared that Florida's law blocking open carry was unconstitutional and a violation of the Second Amendment. Sheriffs in several counties across Florida including Escambia, Santa Rosa, Volusia, Flagler, Polk and more, and a few police departments, quickly announced they would not enforce the ban.

Other law enforcement agencies wondered if that wasn’t jumping the gun, so to speak, since the panel’s decision could be further appealed.

No need to wait, Uthmeier wrote.

All well and good for the A.G. to offer that opinion, but there is an itsy-bitsy technicality—the law is like that sometimes.

Turns out, the court’s decision actually only applies to the 32 north Florida counties in its district, and it doesn’t go into effect until Sept. 25.

That didn’t stop the Florida Sheriff’s Association from issuing guidelines to its own members, advising all 67 county sheriffs in Florida not to arrest anyone with a sidearm strapped to their thigh.

Now with Uthmeier’s advisory, we truly are the Gunshine State.

So, what do you think about the decision to allow open carry of firearms in Florida? You can share your views here:

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Is the clock still TikToking?

The White House has announced it has a solution to the TikTok problem. A “framework” of a deal has been reached between American and Chinese negotiators, and President Donald Trump will close the deal in a phoner with Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, on Friday.

Of course, the last time Trump announced he was closing a deal with another head of state, he got stiffed by Russia’s dictator-for-life Vladimir Putin at their infamous Alaska confab, the purpose of which was to end the war in Ukraine. Drones are still falling from the sky over there.

And what exactly is a “framework” of a deal? Sounds a bit like a concept of a plan, just a tad vague.

Meanwhile, 9.5 million Florida TikTok users and creators are waiting to see if Trump will even bother extending the deadline for the deal, which is scheduled to expire tomorrow.

All that cynicism aside, CNBC is reporting:

The framework agreement for the social media platform TikTok will include new investors as well as existing investors in the platform’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, sources told CNBC’s David Faber.

The deal is expected to close in the next 30 to 45 days, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because the details of the negotiations are confidential. As part of the agreement, Oracle will keep its cloud deal with the platform, the people said.

“Where this thing is capitalized and how large it is remains to be seen,” Faber said Tuesday on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street. “I’m hearing it’s actually going to be relatively small in terms of the actual size of the checks that are written for the entity itself, and it will not be something that is going to go public at some point.”

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Tropical Outlook

Things are heating up—literally—in the Tropical Atlantic. The red blob in the map above is expected to become Tropical Storm Gabrielle, and possibly become a hurricane. The yellow blob just popped up today. And yet another disturbance is expected to roll off the coast of Africa soon.

It has been an unusually slow September so far, as hurricane specialist Bryan Norcross reports on his Hurricane Intel blog:

It's extremely unusual to have no named tropical systems in the first half of September, and even weirder that the pause began in August. Since satellites began monitoring the Atlantic in the 1960s, the only year that was somewhat comparable was the very slow hurricane season in 1968. The only hurricane stronger than Category 1 that year was Hurricane Gladys that hit Florida north of Tampa as a Cat 2 in December.

I’m showing my age by revealing this, but as a teenage reporter for the (now extinct) Tampa Times, I covered Hurricane Gladys, flying over Tampa Bay and along the coast with aerial photographer Bill Morris in his doorless, single-engine Cessna as we were bounced all over the sky in the storm’s aftermath. It was the coolest thing ever, if horrifying.

Will this be another year like 1968, as Norcross suggests? I’ll keep up with things here, and if you’re really interested, you can follow Norcross on his blog here.

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J.C. Bruce, journalist and author, is the founder of Tropic Press. He holds dual citizenship in the United States of America and his native Florida. Forward this email to your friends. They will love you for it.

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