I remember the first time someone called Florida “The Gunshine State” because of its supportive attitude toward guns. Then when they explained just how easy it was to get a gun at the time, I laughed. They still had a three-day waiting period at the time, for example, and I lived in Georgia where we had no waiting period at all.
Since then, the laws there have changed a great deal. The waiting period is gone, but now you have to be 21 to buy any kind of firearm.
It’s still not good.
But at least they got permitless carry, right?
Well, sort of. They’ve gotten permitless concealed carry. Open carry is still prohibited except under specific circumstances, and that’s a big problem.
Now, someone is doing something about it.
Gun rights activists are taking up the fight to strike down Florida’s ban on openly carrying firearms after the Republican-controlled legislature rejected an repeal effort.
Gun Owners of America (GOA) is filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida that seeks to have the 1893 gun restriction declared unconstitutional and a court order to block enforcement of the law. The challenged statute makes it “unlawful for any person to openly carry on or about his or her person any firearm or electric weapon or device.”
“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 complaint obtained by Fox News Digital states.
“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 fight for their independence.”
The arguments advanced by Gun Owners of America assert Florida’s open carry ban is outside the history and tradition of firearms regulation in the U.S. – a direct appeal to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022). The high court held that the ability to carry firearms in public is a constitutional right and that any restrictions must fit within the nation’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
And they’re right, it doesn’t.
Now, understand that I’m fine with an incremental approach to getting our rights restored in the legislatures of this great nation. We didn’t lose our rights overnight and we’re unlikely to get them back overnight, either. Florida’s law was the result of a compromise that moved the needle toward full Second Amendment rights being restored, so it was still ultimately a good thing.
Yet just as anti-gunners refuse to stop with their own victories and continue to try and take more and more, we should do the same, and not just in the legislature, either.
GOA trying to address the open carry restriction is a good step because, frankly, it’s stupid even without the history, text, and tradition standard.
After all, we know that people who openly carry a firearm are almost never the people using a gun to commit a crime. I only say “almost never” because I can’t definitively prove there’s never been a single case where someone was open-carrying and then committed a criminal act. I don’t recall one, though, and you’d think that would be big news if it happened.
So yeah, this needs to end in Florida. People have a right to keep and bear arms. Bearing arms means carrying them, and since the right isn’t open for infringement, Florida’s restrictions need to go down in flames.
