By Jim Saunders ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — Second Amendment groups and a Palm Beach County gun owner Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Florida law that bars people from openly carrying firearms.
Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation and gun owner Richard Hughes filed the lawsuit in South Florida and contended that the open-carry ban does not meet a legal test that such restrictions must be consistent with the nation’s “historical tradition” of firearms regulation.
“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 said. “The 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 lawsuit comes after Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature last year eliminated a longstanding requirement that people obtain state concealed-weapons licenses to be able to carry guns. But lawmakers did not allow people to openly carry firearms, drawing criticism from some Second Amendment activists who said the changes did not go far enough.
The lawsuit, which was first reported Monday by Fox News, names as defendants St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson and Thomas Bakkedahl, the state attorney in the 19th Judicial Circuit, which is made up of St. Lucie, Indian River, Martin and Okeechobee counties.
It cites the enforcement of the open-carry ban by Pearson and Bakkedahl, though it does not make clear why they are defendants and other law-enforcement officials are not.
The Florida Supreme Court in 2017, however, upheld the open-carry ban in a case stemming from the arrest of a man in St. Lucie County. Justices, in a 4-2 ruling, said the state law “regulates only one manner of bearing arms and does not impair the exercise of the fundamental right to bear arms.”
The new lawsuit contends that the 2017 decision was wrong based on U.S. Supreme Court precedents.
While Hughes lives in Palm Beach County, the lawsuit said he sometimes goes to St. Lucie County and would like to openly carry a gun while there. For example, it said he goes to a St. Lucie County nature preserve at least once a month with his dogs and attends a Port St. Lucie gun show.
The lawsuit relies heavily on a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 2008. That includes a 2022 decision in a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that focused on the “historical tradition” of firearms regulation.
“According to the United States Supreme Court, the only way Florida can justify such an extreme restriction is to show a broad and enduring Founding-era historical tradition of governments banning the peaceable open carry of firearms by law-abiding persons, such that demonstrates that the Founders never understood the Second Amendment to protect open carry in the first place,” the lawsuit said. “That is an absurd proposition and a hurdle that Florida simply cannot bear.”
The lawsuit acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court has not decided an open-carry case, but it said the court’s “decisions nevertheless guide and control the inquiry here and demonstrate that the challenged statute is unconstitutional.”
The National Rifle Association is making similar “historical tradition” arguments as it challenges a 2018 Florida law that prevents people under age 21 from buying rifles and other long guns. A federal district judge upheld the law, but the NRA is challenging the ruling at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Legislature and then-Gov. Rick Scott approved the age restriction after the February 2018 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people.
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