Gov. DeSantis warns Milton looters could meet shooters in ‘Second Amendment state’

Another hurricane brings another unambiguous assertion of Floridians’ right to self-defense from the state’s Governor.

“If you think you’re going to go in and loot, you got another thing coming,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a briefing at the state’s Emergency Operations Center.

“If you go into somebody’s house after the storm passes, think that you’re going to be able to commit crimes, you’re going to get in really serious trouble. And quite frankly, you don’t know what’s behind that door in a Second Amendment state.”

Variations of this theme are a staple of storm press conferences for DeSantis, and Hurricane Milton continues the tradition familiar to Floridians who were around for 2023’s Hurricane Idalia and 2022’s Hurricane Ian.

“This part of Florida, you’ve got a lot of advocates and some proponents of the Second Amendment. And I’ve seen signs in different people’s yards in the past after these disasters, and I would say it’s probably here, ‘You loot, we shoot.’ You never know what’s behind that door,” DeSantis said in Perry in 2023.

Speaking near Fort Myers in the leveled community of Matlacha in 2022, he told a similar story.

“They boarded up all the businesses, and there are people that wrote on their plywood, ‘you loot, we shoot,’” DeSantis said. “At the end of the day, we are not going to allow lawlessness to take advantage of this situation. We are a law-and-order state, and this is a law-and-order community, so do not think that you’re going to go take advantage of people who’ve suffered misfortune.”