This week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier failed to challenge the recent Florida First District Court of Appeals decision in McDaniels v. State of Florida, and announced that Florida’s life-saving, decades-old open carry ban should not be applied anywhere in the state.
“Attorney General Uthmeier is refusing to defend a critical law, going against the advice of state law enforcement and ultimately, putting our lives at risk,” said Jennifer Massey, a volunteer with the Florida chapter of Moms Demand Action. “This is a complete dereliction of duty and at the end of the day, our kids, communities and law enforcement will pay the price while we strip a decades-old law from the books meant to help keep us all safe.”
Florida has long been home to one of the strongest bans on open carry in the country. Despite the efforts of gun lobby challenges to undo it, the ban remained in place thanks to support from law enforcement, business owners, and other community stakeholders—even as Florida expanded concealed carry rights.
Last week, in a decision widely celebrated by the gun lobby, Florida’s First District Court of Appeals ruled the state’s open carry ban unconstitutional in McDaniels v. State of Florida. That decision was mistaken: prohibiting open carry is entirely consistent with the Second Amendment under the Supreme Court’s decisions in Bruen and Rahimi, as the Attorney General’s offices in the District of Columbia and New York have explained in recent filings in other courts.
And Monday, Florida Attorney General Uthmeier took to X to announce he would not be appealing the ruling. “As of last week, open carry is the law of the state,” he wrote. This is in addition to Attorney General Uthmeier’s refusal to defend Florida’s law establishing a minimum age of 21 to purchase firearms, passed in the wake of the Parkland shooting, even after the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it by a vote of 8 to 4.
Open carry has been used by extremist groups as a tool to intimidate others at protests or public gatherings. What’s more, open carry makes it difficult to distinguish between a person legally carrying a weapon and someone preparing to commit violence. It unequivocally makes it harder for law enforcement to do their jobs—and it puts them at greater risk of harm.