- March 10, 2025
When deputies responded to a burglary in progress in October 2011, they arrived on scene to see Daniel Floyd standing in his driveway point a handgun at a man surrounded by blood and lying on the ground.
Floyd told deputies that the injured man, Tre’Quan Cobb, came with two other males to Floyd’s house looking for his roommate. When told the roommate was not home, one of the men kicked open the front door, and all three of the men forced themselves into the residence, according to Flagler County Sheriff’s Office documents.
Once inside, one of the men held a gun to Floyd’s head and his girlfriend’s head while the other two men searched through the house.
Floyd was able to arm himself and chase the men out of his home. He shot Cobb, and responding deputies later arrested the two other men, Antonieo Hudson and David Pope.
Incidents like this one are often cited by critics of proposed legislation that would tighten gun regulation who say doing so would violated the Second Amendment.
“There’s nothing wrong here, nothing wrong with this amendment,” said Steve Nobile, owner of HSDS guns in Palm Coast. “There’s nothing that needs to be changed, and if it were (changed), which amendment is next? I’m not scared just for the right to bear arms; I’m scared globally for all rights.”
To Nobile, public safety is important. But so is the right citizens have to own guns as outlined in the Second Amendment.
But that amendment is open to interpretation. Merrill Shapiro, president of the Flagler County Democratic Club, interprets the Constitution through a lens of its authors’ intent. He believes the Second Amendment was intended to protect the right for citizens to own a musket, not fully automatic weapons, he said.
To Shapiro, stricter regulations and bans on certain kinds of weapons would help keep guns out of the hands of criminals and people who are potentially unstable without infringing on the right to bear arms.
The Second Amendment reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Historically, the amendment has been interpreted either to protect the individual citizens’ right to own firearms or the individual states’ right to armed forces. It wasn’t until the 2008 Supreme Court ruling for District of Columbia v. Heller, that the individual citizen’s right to own guns for lawful purposes was upheld.
Then, with the 2010 ruling McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court ruled that Second Amendment rights apply to states as well.
To Nobile, Floyd’s right to arm himself against would-be burglars is without question. And the type of gun that Floyd chose to arm himself with shouldn’t be questioned. “This doesn’t seem like a conversation,”
Nobile said, referring to the topic of gun control. “It seems one-sided. I’m a gun enthusiast, and guns are dangerous. They need to be handled safely, and people need to get the proper training, but to say guns kill just isn’t a proper statement. The person holding the gun is the one that does harm.”
NOTE: This one part in four about guns in Flagler County. Click here for the other three.
