State Sen. Darren Soto said that his first priority was helping the families of the Orlando shooting victims and mourning as a community. | AP Photo Florida politicians at odds over Orlando shooting response Democrats and Republicans from the affected regions are finding little in the way of common ground.

The massacre in Orlando is heightening political passions in one of the most important electoral regions in the country — and already, political leaders in Florida’s I-4 corridor are nearly as divided on the path forward as they are in Washington.

“It looks like it was definitely radical Islam,” said Mark Oxner, the chairman of the Osceola County GOP, which borders Orange County, where Orlando is located. “I don’t think it had a problem with gun laws.”


Objected Ellis Moose, the Democratic chair of neighboring Polk County, “We succumb to the wishes of the NRA, the gun manufacturers, who continue to dump thousands and thousands of guns into the communities of Americans. So what do we expect? Somebody will get shot sooner or later.”

He added of the assailant, “You could say he was radically insane, too.”

The I-4 corridor, which stretches from Orlando west to Tampa, is a diverse, vote-rich area that has substantially contributed to Florida’s booming population growth. While it is not the bellwether region it once was, it remains a critical electoral battleground, and both presidential candidates will need to compete in the area, now the geographic heart of the national debates over security, immigration and guns.

But the geographic proximity to the mass-shooting hasn’t brought politicians any closer to agreement on what should be done about it.

Interviews with around a dozen top Republican and Democratic officials from the area revealed that the debates over both terrorism and gun control have been injected, in a deeply personal way, into one of the most critical political regions in the country, setting the stage for a pitched presidential battle there over issues that hit close to home.

And for all the talk of unity, the dynamic has already taken a polarizing turn in the region as local leaders mull whether to prioritize calls for combating extremism or tightening gun laws in the wake of the shooting at a gay nightclub that claimed 49 victims. The assailant, Omar Mateen, pledged his support for ISIS — as well as his support for other terrorist groups that are fighting against ISIS — as he used an assault rifle to carry out the murders in Orlando. While politicos from Orlando proper have been more careful about avoiding partisan rhetoric, leaders on both sides of the aisle in the region are largely playing to political type in choosing which concerns to emphasize.

Hillary Clinton on Monday called the attack at a gay nightclub in Orlando “radical Islamism,” even as she has also called for more stringent gun measures — a move designed to neutralize the Republican argument that Democrats are afraid to confront extremism head-on out of concern for political correctness.

But in Orlando and the surrounding areas, both Democrats and Republicans are taking more traditional partisan positions. Democrats remain uncomfortable with the term “radical Islam” and instead are focused on modifying gun regulations, while Republicans insist that the focus should be on combating extremism, rather than on gun control, echoing the views pushed by presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.

“My issue really relates more to gun safety in solving this problem,” said Bob Poe, a Democratic congressional candidate from Florida’s 10th district, in the Orlando area. “There have been more cases in this country, over the last year, more people have died, that have nothing to do with Islam.”

Referring to Dylann Roof, the perpetrator in a shooting at an African American church in Charleston, S.C., he continued, “I don’t know that it does any good, do we want to call that any sort of radical 'Christian extremist?' I don’t know where that gets us.”

State Sen. Darren Soto, another Democratic congressional candidate from the Ninth District, which also includes parts of the Orlando area, said that his first priority was helping the families of the victims and mourning as a community, a sentiment echoed by political leaders on both sides of the aisle. But after that, he said, in addition to promoting rights for the LGBT community, “we’ll certainly be looking at individuals on watch lists, No Fly-lists, not being able to have firearms.”

That may be a tough sell with Republicans in the region.

“While those measures sound good on the surface, it boils down to who makes the decisions,” said Jim Guth, the GOP chairman of Polk County, which Mitt Romney won in 2012. Noting that the Internal Revenue Service has in the past targeted some conservative groups, he continued, “Are they as arbitrary as the current administration? If you take people on the No Fly list and arbitrarily say they can’t have guns, we already know there are people on No Fly lists who shouldn’t be there at all. I don’t trust the federal government to make those decisions.”

Jeff Lukens, on the executive board of the Hillsborough County GOP, a Tampa-area county that backed President Barack Obama in 2012, said he saw “some merit” to restricting No Fly list members’ access to guns. But the bigger issue, he said, was combating extremism.

“There’s nothing wrong with our laws,” he said. “The problem is Islamic terrorism. That’s where the focus should be.”

Republicans in Orlando itself, however, were less willing to take an overtly partisan position following the attacks, with several noting personal ties to victims. Rich Crotty, a state committeeman from the Orange County Republican Executive Committee, declined to say whether his personal views on gun control might be changed by the attack—but he suggested that others might be prompted to moderate.

“It’s very personalized,” he said. “I know several people who have had loved ones that were in the club. I had a frantic call from my daughter…she was worried [about] a friend of hers who does go there from time to time, she couldn’t reach him. This makes the issue up close and personal for central Florida.

“…So could this move the needle on opinion in this one area in the Orlando market? Possibly,” he continued. “We’ll see what the outcome is. It may cause people in this market to rethink their position on the matter of gun control, because it’s up close and personal.”

