The pro-freedom group Gun Owners of America recently filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida challenging the state’s decades-long ban on the open carry of firearms.
The statute, which makes it “unlawful for any person to openly carry on or about his or her person any firearm or electric weapon or device,” has been in effect and infringing on the rights of lawful Floridians since 1893. Despite Florida’s gun-friendly status, it is one of only four states where open carry is still wholly banned.
And while Florida has joined more than half of the other states in the union as constitutional or “permitless” carry states, that law only applies to concealed firearms, not those carried openly.
“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,” said Erich Pratt, GOA senior vice president. “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.”
The lawsuit, GOA v. Pearson, argues that the law is unconstitutional because it directly infringes on the Second Amendment right of Floridians to keep and bear arms.
“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.
“This 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 complaint points out that a complete prohibition on open carry of firearms is directly unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.
“The Second Amendments plain text contradicts the notion that an open carry ban is permissible—after all, the amendment was designed to guarantee the ability of the body politic to form a “well-regulated Militia”—meaning well-trained, armed to the teeth, and competent to resist oppression from foreign aggressors and domestic tyrants,” the complaint states. “No conventional military force in history ever has been confined to covert carry of concealable firearms (ie., Small handguns), and thus the Second Amendment was designed to secure something far more substantial than carrying a snub-nosed revolver in one’s pocket while grocery shopping.”
As GOA also mentioned in the lawsuit, the Florida open carry ban was adopted decades after Reconstruction and more than a century after the Second Amendment was ratified. “To make matters worse, that 1893 carry ban openly targeted only a disfavored subset of the population—newly freed Blacks—while Whites enjoyed de facto immunity from enforcement,” according to the complaint.
In the end, GOA is asking the court to declare that the statute violates both the Second and Fourteenth amendments, and preliminarily and permanently enjoin all Florida law enforcement from enforcing the law.
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