Aha. Thanks for response.
I am not on any crusade against bar owners in general. I am mainly trying to understand all the legal details and implications.
However, it seems to me that the law puts bar owners in a moral squeeze. Patrons are required to be unarmed by law. From my point of view, this automatically places patrons at some risk. It is difficult for me to contemplate that the liability exposure can be legislatively made to vanish by transferring responsibility for a flawed security loophole to the state, who cannot be sued. That just seems like flawed law.
I feel a need to step back and consider an analogy to schools. How many public schools are armed these days? In California, i get the impression that policy varies from city to city— in particular, some districts have police presence at some or all school sites, and at least where they do, that so far, this seems to work well. Of course, bars cannot simply have police on site— there are just not enough police and there is also the matter of pay. But regardless of details, a form of “protection vacuum” seems obvious for bars, as it imaginably would have been to those california cities who now have school site police presence.
Another analogy would be to some archetypal Wild West saloon with the bartender and his shotgun always kept loaded and ready behind the bar, at least in movies. Or, apparently, some town sheriffs implemented their own gun control by requiring cowboys to turn in their guns when they rode into town, returning them when they rode back out, and that cowboys meekly acquiesced (this seems more mythical than real to me, but whatever).
Anyway so florida legislatively created a protection vacuum without filling the vacuum? The implications still seem murky to me. I am getting an impression that Florida ran itself up a tree so to speak with its own legislation in this corner case situation...