By Jim Saunders ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — Prosecutors are urging a federal judge to toss out a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Florida law that bars people from openly carrying firearms, saying the law is consistent with the “historical tradition” of gun regulation.
Lawyers for defendant Thomas Bakkedahl, the state attorney in the 19th Judicial Circuit, filed an 18-page motion last week seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed in August by the Second Amendment group Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation and gun owner Richard Hughes.
While Florida allows people to carry concealed firearms, it does not allow openly carrying guns.
The lawsuit relies heavily on a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including 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.”
But the motion to dismiss the case disputed such arguments, saying the Supreme Court in the Bruen case “held that the Second Amendment protects the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense, ‘subject to certain reasonable, well-defined restrictions.’”
“Bruen expressly approved of public carry licensing systems like Florida’s, which do not ‘prevent law-abiding, responsible citizens from exercising their Second Amendment right to public carry,’” the motion said. “Therefore, based on the Supreme Court’s previous ruling, it would follow that Florida’s current public carry licensing system and restrictions on open carry are constitutional and do not infringe on plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights.”
The lawsuit, filed in South Florida, named as defendants St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson Bakkedahl and the 19th Judicial Circuit state attorney’s office, which prosecutes cases in St. Lucie, Indian River, Martin and Okeechobee counties. It cited the enforcement of the open-carry ban by Pearson and Bakkedahl.
The Florida Supreme Court in 2017 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 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.
But in last week’s motion to dismiss the case, attorneys for Bakkedahl and his office said other cases about the law are pending in Florida appellate courts, including a Pensacola case that is scheduled for arguments Oct. 16 in the state’s 1st District Court of Appeal.
The motion said the issue should play out in state courts, not the federal court.
“In effect, plaintiff wants this federal court to unnecessarily stand in the shoes of the state court and substitute its judgment in lieu of the better-positioned state court,” the motion said. “This could only encourage unnecessary friction” between Florida and federal courts.
The plaintiffs face an Oct. 1 deadline for responding to the motion. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez.
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