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Gun owners, particularly concealed carry permit holders, carry for a reason. They tend to be passionate advocates of the Second Amendment, and we hope they are paying attention to this breach. Why or that they carry is nobody’s business but their own, it is their right. The Putnam team did an admirable job of explaining the data breach and seemed to be candid about what information was stolen. They then tried to diminish the significance of the data loss by noting that only a fraction of the names released contained Social Security numbers, a critical component to identity theft. The fact that the only reason more Social Security numbers were not released was because the department simply didn’t have them, was not lost on USA Herald.

Mistakes, hacks and failures are a part of life. We don’t expect Putnam to be a Cyber Security expert personally protecting this data, but we do expect him to hire people who can. Regardless, it is not that occasional failures occur that is the problem, it’s how we react to them that defines us and separates real leaders from the posers. We will take Putnam at his word that his cybersecurity review will be meaningful. We trust Putnam here to work seriously to protect this data, not for any reason other than it is politically smart and necessary for him to do this as the gun crowd is such an important and active political constituency in the GOP.

It must be noted that this administrative function of the Department stands in stark contrast compared to Putnam’s other regulatory role where he must also inspect and regulate businesses in order to protect the public from food safety violations at grocery stores.  We note that the last on-line activity that Putnam had to review was his rating of food safety standards following revelations that his friends and big donors at Publix failed several inspections.

Putnam’s actions here were abominable at best and bordering corrupt as he hid the results and then changed the standards so his friends at Publix didn’t have to withstand the scrutiny and public relations nightmare that may have followed. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed from Publix’s banks accounts to those of Putnam’s political committee accounts. Thankfully, as far as we know, the hackers here are not big donors to the Putnam campaign for Governor, so we expect the Commissioner can simply do his job this time.

For an elected regulator to hide the failure of a simple regulatory function to protect a friendly company is exactly why we cannot trust Adam Putnam with any bigger responsibilities than he now has. Given this new failure by Putnam’s leadership team, it makes us wonder if Adam Putnam is worthy of the dubious honor once bestowed upon Bill Nelson, who most assuredly deserved the cover of Florida Trend and the title “Empty Suit.”