Tom Stieghorst
The news that 34 people have been stopped from entering Walt Disney World with firearms since the start of 2020 should set off a quiet alarm for anyone with an interest in promoting and expanding tourism in Florida.
The development, unearthed through a search of public records by the Orlando Sentinel, is just one of several suggesting that guns are a stealth issue for the state's visitor industry.
Over 100 illegal guns were confiscated by authorities on Miami Beach earlier this year during a six-week period of spring break.
And it seems hardly a week goes by without another disturbing gun incident somewhere in the state. A deranged man kills two people he doesn't know at a supermarket in Royal Palm Beach. A carload of thugs shoots up a party at a rented hall in Miami Gardens.
Individually, they can all be explained and rationalized. Collectively they begin to create a public impression that something's not right in the Sunshine State.
The problem is said to stem in part from an increase in gun purchases during the pandemic. Nationwide, more than 20,000 people were killed last year in the U.S. by firearms, a record number according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although there's no hard proof, the rise in deaths seems to parallel a more aggressive attitude in some parts of the population toward the exercise of Second Amendment rights. Put plainly, more people may be carrying weapons than in the past.
The Orlando Sentinel said as recently as 2016, only four people were stopped trying to improperly bring firearms into Disney World.
Whether this is a particular problem for tourism in Florida is debatable, to be sure. The Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando killed 49 people in 2016, at the time the deadliest mass shooting in modern history. Yet in 2017, the number of visitors to Orlando rose 3.3%.
Still, somewhere in the collective unconscious it is probably not lost that the two deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, at Pulse and a year later in Las Vegas, occurred in the two busiest tourism hubs in the country.
Particularly in an international context, the U.S. is out of step with many countries where gun violence is much rarer. In a survey by the firm Destination Analysts in 2019, one in five global travelers expressed "concerns about my personal safety" as a reason not to travel to the U.S. But the survey also found that a greater number were more concerned about the expense of a U.S. vacation, the difficulty of U.S. customs procedures, exchange rates and other non-safety issues.
Florida is neither the best nor the worst state for gun deaths, ranking 26th in 2020 with 12.7 deaths per 100,000 residents. (The U.S. average is 10.9 per 100,000). The state's gun laws are the 24th most stringent, according to the Giffords Law Center, a gun-control advocacy group, which graded Florida C- last year, along with Wisconsin and Vermont.
But in absolute terms, there are a lot of gun deaths because Florida is the third most populous state. Sooner or later, all those flying bullets are going to find some tourists, like they did in the early 1990s when a number of visitors were attacked at highway rest stops in northern Florida.
The resulting publicity was a black eye for Florida, which had to spend a lot on damage control to win visitors back. It would be a lot cheaper, given the rising tide of gun incidents so far in 2021, to take some proactive measures to address the proliferation of gun use before it becomes the next reason not to come to Florida.