TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — For nearly 40 years, Florida has had a ban on the open carry of firearms that was signed into law by a Republican governor and defended by a Republican-controlled Legislature against the efforts of gun rights advocates and, more recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But last Wednesday, a state appeals court struck down the 1987 ban as unconstitutional. The First District Court of Appeal was the first court in the country to rule that prohibiting open carry violated the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling prompted celebration, alarm and questions.

Some doubted the First DCA properly interpreted past U.S. Supreme Court decisions on which it relied so heavily. And some questioned whether the ruling applied beyond the district’s jurisdiction, which extends from the Panhandle through the Big Bend and north Central Florida, given a prior Florida Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban. Still others held out hope that other cases could be used to challenge the ruling.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier praised the court’s ruling as “a big win for the Second Amendment rights of Floridians,” said he would not appeal and insisted it was now the law across the state.

The ruling came out about an hour before news broke that right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed at a university in Utah, a state that allows open carry even on college campuses. Democrats upset by the court’s decision noted Republicans were mourning Kirk’s death while celebrating a ruling that likely will mean more guns in public places.

Some Democratic state lawmakers now want to put in guardrails that could limit open carry and plan to discuss it when they return to Tallahassee for committee hearings in October.

Republican leaders who helped thwart past efforts to rescind the ban have been mum since the ruling, however. And gun rights organizations that spent thousands of dollars over the last 15 years to rescind Florida’s open carry ban say they will fight any legislative efforts to chip away at that victory.

“We will not accept any attempt to weaken the ruling … nor any other attack on the Second Amendment as a whole from the Florida Legislature,” said Luis Valdes, Florida director of Gun Owners of America.

But gun safety groups said Florida’s appeal court got its ruling wrong. “This decision can and should be appealed,” said Meg Beauregard, a policy counsel fellow with Everytown for Gun Safety. “Not doing so would be recklessly playing games with the safety and lives of Floridians.”

The case began on July 4, 2022, when Stanley Victor McDaniels, a candidate for Escambia County Commission, was arrested. He’d been standing in a major intersection of Pensacola waving at people passing by. He had a copy of the U.S. Constitution in one hand and a loaded pistol in his waistband.

In court, he asked to have the charges against him dropped and the open carry ban declared unconstitutional, but he was convicted and sentenced to probation and community service.

Two decades earlier, he’d been convicted of felony possession of a hallucinogen with intent to sell. That would have prevented him from owning a gun and pursuing the open carry challenge years later. But the circuit judge waived that earlier conviction in exchange for 12 months of probation, counseling and drug testing. Two weeks ago, in a separate case, McDaniels was convicted of violating a restraining order and sentenced to three months in jail.

Though the local court convicted McDaniels of the gun charge in 2022, it sent a question to the First DCA as one of great public importance — whether the state’s open carry ban violated the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms and its historic limits on firearms.

The trial court stayed his sentence pending the appeal, and last week the appeals court overturned McDaniels’ conviction and said the open carry ban was incompatible with the Second Amendment’s “text and historical tradition.” It based its ruling on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen and other cases.

Writing for the three-judge panel, Judge Stephanie Ray said that “history confirms that the right to bear arms in public necessarily includes the right to do so openly. That is not to say that open carry is absolute or immune from reasonable regulation.”

The Bruen case sparked a wave of challenges to state gun laws across the nation “questioning what was once settled law — with the consequence of putting the public at greater risk to gun violence,” said David Pucino, legal director for the Giffords Law Center, a nonprofit that has been promoting gun safety laws for 30 years.

Florida’s appeals court did not interpret the Bruen case correctly, Pucino said. The U.S. Supreme Court decision was not about whether a state could ban open carry or concealed carry but whether it could require a special reason to carry a gun in public, he said

People have the right to carry guns in public, but “either open or concealed is permissible,” he said. Florida has allowed residents to carry guns in public for decades, so there was nothing wrong with its open carry ban, he added.

A day after the Florida ruling, plaintiffs in a federal case against the District of Columbia tried arguing that it applied to their case against the city’s concealed carry law, which prohibits carrying a gun in a purse or backpack.

District attorneys argued the Florida case did not apply and, like others, said the First DCA erred in its ruling.

They called the ruling an “outlier” that did not follow U.S. Supreme Court precedents, which said that the “manner of public carry was subject to reasonable regulation,” meaning a ban on open carry in a state that allowed residents to carry concealed weapons was permissible.

Florida’s former attorney general, Ashley Moody, now a U.S. senator, defended the state’s open carry ban in court. But Uthmeier, appointed by DeSantis to replace Moody, said he doesn’t plan to appeal or ask for a rehearing.

Immediately after the ruling, some Florida sheriffs, mostly in the Panhandle, told their deputies to no longer enforce the ban. But in Jacksonville and Pinellas County sheriffs said the ban was still in place in their jurisdictions.

A 2015 Florida Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban could limit the scope of the First DCA ruling to just the counties in that district, Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

Pinellas County is in the Second DCA.

“As a matter of well-established law, a lower court, especially one in another district, cannot overrule the law established by the Florida Supreme Court,” Gualtieri said. “We must consider whether the Supreme Court’s prior decision is the law in Pinellas County.”

Even Eric Friday, the lawyer for McDaniels and general counsel for Florida Carry Inc., a grassroots Second Amendment advocacy group, said that while he was happy with the ruling, he had some concerns about its applicability.

He said in his “ideal world,” Uthmeier would appeal to the state supreme court and ask that it affirm the First DCA decision applied statewide.

On Monday, Uthmeier told law enforcement agencies that the First DCA ruling was “the law of the state” and binding on all Florida trial courts, since no other appellate court has ruled on the matter since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen decision.

That message addressed “almost every single concern I had,” Friday said later.

His organizations and others, he added, are poised to file “a preemptive lawsuit against anyone” that tries to challenge the First DCA ruling by taking it before another district court of appeal.

Several Democratic lawmakers have called the ruling a step backwards that could erode public safety.

“The Legislature will have to put some guardrails on it when it comes to open carry,” said State Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami, who is a licensed gun owner. “It appears we need to have a larger conversation about who is carrying guns. We cannot be the Wild, Wild West.”

Senate President Ben Albritton said during last session that he relied on the advice of that state’s sheriffs, who mostly opposed open carry, as his reason for opposing any bills that would repeal the ban. House Speaker Daniel Perez said last year he saw no need for open carry since a law allowing concealed weapons without a permit was approved in 2023.

Both have been silent on the First DCA ruling and did not respond to requests for comment.

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