Gun rights groups go to federal court to overturn Florida law banning open carry of firearms

Although Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has voiced support allowing for the open carrying of firearms in Florida, he hasn’t done much to persuade the GOP-led Legislature to actually pass such legislation.

Now two Second Amendment groups say they’re tired of waiting for the state to act and have filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging Florida’s ban on open carry.

The Gun Owners of America (GOA), Gun Owners Foundation, and Palm Beach County resident Richard Hughes filed a 40-page lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Tuesday, alleging that the ban on open carry of firearms violates the Second and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

“Despite its reputation as a largely gun-friendly state, Florida inexplicably continues to prohibit the peaceable carrying of firearms in an open and unconcealed manner,” the lawsuit begins.

“This blatant infringement of the Second Amendment right to ‘bear arms’ runs counter to this nation’s historical tradition and would have criminalized the very colonists who openly carried their muskets and mustered on the greens at Lexington and Concord to right for their independence.”

The complaint mentions that the state’s open carry ban, initially adopted in 1893, came decades after Reconstruction and more than a century after the Second Amendment was ratified. Making matters worse, it avers, is that the 1893 carry ban “targeted only a disfavored subset of the population — newly freed blacks — while whites enjoyed de facto immunity from enforcement.”

During the 2023 legislative session, the Florida GOP-controlled Legislature passed a law allowing residents to legally carry concealed weapons without having to obtain a permit through the state, a measure known by supporters as “constitutional carry” and by everyone else as permitless carry.

But several prominent gun rights advocates were outspoken during the legislative committee process last year that the state wasn’t going far enough, and that it needed pass an “open carry” provision as well. Although the state has a national reputation as one of the strongest advocates for Second Amendment rights, only three other states — California, Illinois, and New York, along with the District of Columbia — ban the open carry of firearms.

Thumbs down from legislative leaders

During the 2024 legislative session held earlier this year, Hillsborough County Republican Mike Beltran filed legislation to allow open carry, as well as allowing lawmakers to carry concealed guns to legislative meetings and in the state Capitol building.

But neither House Speaker Paul Renner or Senate President Kathleen Passidomo showed any enthusiasm for the bill, and it died without a committee hearing. DeSantis, who was on the campaign trail in Iowa in the months leading up to the session, never pushed those leaders to schedule the bill.

“You have a Republican House Speaker state that he and his Republican colleagues don’t have an ‘appetite’ to debate and vote on open carry. You have a Republican Senate President state that repealing the under-21 purchase ban is a ‘non-starter.’ Yet both have the nerve to campaign that they’re pro-gun,” said Luis Valdes, Florida state director of Gun Owners of America, in February.

“Florida lawmakers claim to be pro-gun, but year after year, they’ve refused to repeal the 1987 ban on open carry, leaving Floridians in the very anti-gun company of New York, Illinois, and California, where this is also prohibited,” said Erich Pratt, GOA’s senior vice president, in a written statement announcing the filing of the lawsuit.

“GOA has been left with no choice but to sue the state, especially since GOA’s open carry bill was blocked by the Republican legislative leadership during the 2024 session’s first week. The ban has no historical basis and will surely be found unconstitutional under the Bruen precedent. We look forward to making our case and fighting for law-abiding Floridians.”

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 struck down a New York law limiting carrying firearms in the open in a decision that greatly expanded gun rights.

However, in June the high court backtracked somewhat in United States v. Rahimi, upholding a federal law that bars people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from owning a firearm.

Norman v. State

In 2017, the Florida Supreme Court upheld state restrictions on openly carrying a firearm, saying in Norman v. State that the law did not violate citizens’ Second Amendment rights in a case brought up by Dale Lee Norton, a St. Lucie County resident who faced a second-degree misdemeanor charge after he walked down a road with handgun holstered to his hip, according to the Courthouse News Service.

Norman had filed a motion to dismiss the case based on the purported unconstitutionality of Florida’s open carry law.

The new lawsuit says that state Supreme Court ruling failed on a couple of fronts: for “not once consulting contemporaneous authorities to discern the meaning of the Second Amendment’s text” and failure to conduct a historical analysis of the “nation’s early tradition as to open carry — or any tradition, for that matter.”

It adds that the Norman ruling’s “clearly erroneous Second Amendment analysis has no binding effect on this Court.”

The defendants listed in the lawsuit are St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson, the St. Lucie County’s Sheriff’s Office, Thomas Bakkedahl, state attorney for the 19th Judicial Circuit of Florida, and the State’s Attorney’s Office for that circuit.

“Sheriff Pearson’s enforcement of the ban on open carry within St. Lucie County places Plaintiffs under imminent threat of arrest and prosecution should they violate the ban on open carry,” the complaint says. The same is true for the Sheriff’s Office. As for the State Attorney’s office, the complaint notes that, “in fact, one of the SOA’s prior open carry prosecutions led to the decision in Norman v. State.”