A three judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal, pointing to U.S. Supreme Court Rulings on Second Amendment Issues, said the open-carry 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 ruling 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. It also came after years of legislative debate about potentially repealing the open-carry ban — a position supported this week by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
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. That decision focused on looking at the “historical tradition” of firearms regulation.
Ray wrote that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision, which stemmed from a 2012 arrest in St. Lucie County, “does not provide controlling precedent, and this court must evaluate McDaniels’ claim under the (U.S.) Supreme Court’s text, history, and tradition standard.”
“Because the Second Amendment’s plain text encompasses the open carrying of firearms in public, that conduct is presumptively protected by the Constitution,” Wednesday’s opinion said. “The state therefore bears the heavy burden of establishing a relevant historical tradition of firearms regulation that justifies its prohibition. The state has not met that burden. It is not enough to rely on a generalized tradition of firearms regulation, for at that level of abstraction almost any law could be sustained.”