Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Monday said people being able to openly carry guns is “the law of the state,” after a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal last week ruled that a longstanding ban was unconstitutional.
Uthmeier sent guidance to prosecutors and law-enforcement agencies. Some had already stopped enforcing the open-carry ban after Wednesday’s opinion.
Uthmeier said in an online post that no other Florida appellate courts had considered the constitutionality of the open-carry ban after two closely watched U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2022 and 2024. As a result, he said “the First District’s decision is binding on all Florida’s trial courts,”
A 1987 law made it a misdemeanor to visibly display guns, though exceptions existed, for example, for hunting. Floridians could carry concealed weapons.
In the guidance, Uthmeier told prosecutors and law-enforcement agencies to refrain from arresting or putting on trial “law-abiding citizens carrying a firearm in a manner that is visible to others” as Florida courts couldn’t convict such people.
Uthmeier added that state law still requires gun owners to be responsible with their firearms.
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“Nothing in the decision permits individuals to menace others with firearms in public, nor does it undermine the state’s authority to prohibit felons from possessing firearms,” the guidance said.
The appeals-court opinion came in a challenge filed by Stanley Victor McDaniels, who was convicted of openly carrying a gun on the Fourth of July in 2022 in Pensacola.
Pointing to U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Second Amendment cases, a three-judge panel of the Tallahassee-based appeals court said the ban is incompatible with the nation’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
“No historical tradition supports Florida’s open carry ban,” Judge Stephanie Ray wrote in a 20-page opinion joined by Judges Lori Rowe and M. Kemmerly Thomas. “To the contrary, history confirms that the right to bear arms in public necessarily includes the right to do so openly. That is not to say that open carry is absolute or immune from reasonable regulation. But what the state may not do is extinguish the right altogether for ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens.”
The Florida Supreme Court in 2015 upheld the constitutionality of the open-carry ban. But in Wednesday’s opinion, Ray said a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen governs the issue.
In his guidance, Uthmeier added that the court ruling doesn’t affect prohibitions on having guns in places such as police stations, courthouses, polling places, government meetings and schools.
Democrats criticized the court opinion, with state Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens, on Thursday calling it “tone deaf given the state of violence in this country.”
“Florida’s current laws already robustly protect Second Amendment rights, even to the point of being a Stand Your Ground state. This ruling goes against the common-sense protections that keep our communities safe,” Jones wrote.
