TALLAHASSEE — A Southeast Florida sheriff and a state attorney are trying to scuttle a challenge to the constitutionality of a Florida law that bars people from openly carrying guns.
St. Lucie County Sheriff Richard Del Toro and 19th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Thomas Bakkedahl on Friday asked a federal judge to side with them in a lawsuit filed last year by Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation and Palm Beach County resident Richard Hughes.
In a 21-page motion for summary judgment, the sheriff and prosecutor, who are defendants in the case, argued that the law preventing open carrying of guns does not violate Second Amendment rights. Florida allows people to carry concealed weapons.
“The Second Amendment’s plain text does not protect a right to the open carriage when another means of public carriage (concealed carriage) is available. … The plain text protects the right to keep and bear arms, not the right to carry them in any particular manner, such as openly,” Arthur “Buddy” Jacobs, an attorney for Del Toro and Bakkedhal, wrote in the motion.
But the plaintiffs on June 3 filed a motion for summary judgment that argued the Second Amendment’s text encompasses “not just the concealed carry of firearms, but also their open carry.”
“Yet despite the Second Amendment’s plain textual coverage of the right to open carry — and the indisputable historical record of such a widespread practice — the state of Florida criminalizes the open carry of firearms in all but the narrowest of enumerated contexts, none of which offers plaintiffs any statutory protection as they go about their daily lives,” attorneys James Phillips and Stephen Stamboulieh wrote in the plaintiffs’ motion.
If U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez grants either motion for summary judgment, it would short-circuit a trial in the case.
Allowing people to openly carry guns has long been a heavily debated issue in Florida. The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in August 2024 in federal court in Fort Pierce, naming then-St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson and Bakkedahl, whose circuit includes St. Lucie County, as defendants. Del Toro subsequently replaced Pearson as a defendant.
Friday’s motion for a summary judgment pointed to the case being filed in St. Lucie County, while Hughes is a Palm Beach County resident. It argued that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing and were seeking an overly broad ruling that would allow people to openly carry guns throughout Florida.
“To be clear, defendants are not suggesting that plaintiffs must sue every jurisdiction where harm might conceivably occur,” Jacobs wrote. “Rather, that plaintiffs should have brought suit against the parties actually responsible for the alleged harm — namely, those in the jurisdictions where plaintiffs live or intend to engage in the challenged conduct, and whose actions can be directly traced to the injury and redressed by the court.”
But in their summary judgment motion last month, the plaintiffs said, for example, that Hughes wants to openly carry a gun when he visits an “eco-center” in St. Lucie County with his dogs, attends a gun show and gets gas at a Florida Turnpike service plaza.
The two sides also have sparred about how to apply U.S. Supreme Court precedents in gun cases. A key issue is whether Florida’s open-carry ban is consistent with a “historical tradition” in the nation of gun regulation.
In their motion last month, the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote that there is “no historical tradition of banning the open carry of firearms.”
“Even if this court were to proceed beyond the plain text (of the Second Amendment) to an analysis of history, the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to identify any founding-era statute that restricted the ability of ordinary people to bear arms openly in public,” the plaintiffs’ motion said.
But Friday’s motion by the defendants said the prohibition on openly carrying guns is “consistent with the applicable historical tradition.”
“While plaintiffs would have this court believe that laws regulating the manner in which individuals publicly carry their firearms are some kind of recent aberration inconsistent with this country’s traditions and history, such a claim could not be further from the truth,” the motion said. “Gun laws are by no means a contemporary phenomenon — while gun possession is as old as America, so too are the laws that regulate them.”