Two Second Amendment groups and a Palm Beach County gun owner have filed a federal lawsuit challenging a Florida law that bans people from openly carrying firearms.
Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation and Richard Hughes filed the complaint August 6 against St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson, the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department, 19th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Thomas Bakkedahl and the State Attorney’s Office for the 19th Judicial Circuit, which includes St. Lucie, Indian River, Martin and Okeechobee counties.
“Florida lawmakers claim to be pro-gun, but year after year, they’ve refused to repeal the 1987 ban on open carry, leaving Floridians in the very anti-gun company of New York, Illinois and California where this is also prohibited,” GOA Senior Vice President Erich Pratt said. “GOA has been left with no choice but to sue the state, especially since GOA’s open carry bill was blocked by the Republican legislative leadership during the 2024 session’s first week.
“This ban has no historical basis and will surely be found unconstitutional under the Bruen precedent. We look forward to making our case and fighting for law-abiding Floridians.”
The plaintiffs allege violations of the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. They seek a declaration saying the law that bans open carry is unconstitutional and injunctive relief enjoining the defendants from enforcing it.
“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 states. “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 plaintiffs claim the ban doesn’t meet the legal test that these types of restrictions must be consistent with the country’s “historical tradition” of firearms regulation.
They also say a 2017 Florida Supreme Court ruling that upheld state restrictions on open carry failed by “not once consulting contemporaneous authorities to discern the meaning of the Second Amendment’s text” and for not conducting a historical analysis of the “nation’s early tradition as to open carry — or any tradition, for that matter.”
Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state Legislature removed the requirement that people obtain concealed-weapons licenses to carry guns, but the lawmakers did not allow people to openly carry firearms. Second Amendment proponents said more change is needed.
Before that, the Florida Supreme Court upheld an open-carry ban in a 2017 opinion in a case about the arrest of a man in St. Lucie County, ruling the state law "regulates only one manner of bearing arms and does not impair the exercise of the fundamental right to bear arms."
The plaintiffs say Pearson and Bakkedahl have enforced the open carry ban, and they argue the the 2017 decision was wrong based on U.S. Supreme Court precedents.
“Sheriff Pearson’s enforcement of the ban on open carry within St. Lucie County places plaintiffs under imminent threat of arrest and prosecution should they violate the ban on open carry,” the complaint says, saying the same goes for the sheriff’s office.
In the complaint, Hughes says he regularly goes to a nature preserve in St. Lucie County and attends a gun show there as well.
“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.”
A bill to allow open carry was introduced during this year’s legislative session, but it died in committee.
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 struck down a New York law limiting carrying firearms in the open. But in June in United States v. Rahimi, the justice upheld a federal law barring people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from owning a firearm.