The bottom line
On December 11, 2025, Florida formally agreed in federal court that open carry bans are unconstitutional. The state paid Gun Owners of America’s attorney fees and acknowledged that its decades-long prohibition on openly carrying firearms conflicts with the Second Amendment. Most people in the gun rights community shrugged. That was a mistake.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What actually happened in Florida
To understand the settlement, you need the full timeline. Florida banned open carry in 1987. For nearly four decades, openly carrying a firearm in public was a criminal offense punishable by up to 60 days in jail. Florida’s Supreme Court upheld that ban in 2015 under the old interest-balancing approach to Second Amendment cases that Bruen later repudiated.
Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners Foundation filed suit in August 2024 in the Southern District of Florida, challenging Florida Statute § 790.053(1) as unconstitutional under the Bruen framework. The case was GOA v. Del Toro, named for the St. Lucie County State Attorney. GOA won at the district court level, the case was appealed, and while that appeal was pending, the Florida First District Court of Appeal issued a separate ruling in McDaniels v. State on September 10, 2025, declaring the open carry ban unconstitutional on its face. The First DCA applied the Bruen text-history-and-tradition test and found zero historical support for a blanket prohibition on open carry.
With that appellate ruling on the books, Florida had no viable path to defending its position. On December 11, 2025, in the Southern District of Florida, St. Lucie County’s State Attorney and Sheriff reached a settlement with GOA and GOF. The defendants agreed not to enforce Florida’s open carry ban, acknowledged that the open carry of firearms is “presumptively protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment,” and agreed that § 790.053(1) is incompatible with the Second Amendment. The state also paid GOA’s attorney fees.
That last part is not a footnote. When a state pays attorney fees in a constitutional challenge, it is acknowledging that the constitutional violation was clear enough to justify fee-shifting. That is a formal concession, not just a settlement of convenience.
Why the people who say “who cares, we already have concealed carry” are wrong
I hear this constantly and I understand the instinct. Florida passed constitutional carry in 2023, which means qualifying individuals can carry concealed without a license. If you can carry concealed without a permit, why does open carry matter? The gun is on you either way.
Here is why that framing misses the point.
The First DCA’s McDaniels opinion made an observation that cuts to the core of what the Second Amendment actually protects: “open carry and concealed carry were regarded as distinct, and open carry was the default mode of bearing arms that preserved the core of the Second Amendment right.” That is historically accurate. For most of American history, open carry was not just legal, it was the norm. Carrying a firearm on your hip was as unremarkable as carrying a knife. The idea that gun ownership should be hidden, that it should be something you do quietly and keep out of public view, is a modern invention with no roots in the founding-era understanding of what it means to “bear arms.”
Some states in the nineteenth century restricted concealed carry specifically because it was associated with criminal activity, dueling culture, and dishonorable conduct. Open carry, by contrast, was considered the respectable mode of bearing arms. The historical tradition runs directly counter to what Florida had been enforcing for 38 years. When the First DCA said there is “no historical tradition” supporting Florida’s ban, that was not advocacy. That was the result of applying the test the Supreme Court mandated in Bruen.
The functional argument misses the symbolic one
I am not going to pretend open carry is always the tactical choice. There are legitimate arguments that open carry makes you a higher-priority target for someone intending to commit violence, and there are arguments on the other side that visible firearms deter crime before it starts. I see both. I have always thought concealed carry is generally the better practical option for self-defense purposes. That is not the point.
The point is what open carry does to American gun culture at a social level.
Right now, according to survey data, roughly 40% of American households own firearms. A meaningful percentage of those owners carry regularly. But most non-gun people have never personally seen a firearm outside of a law enforcement context. They have never stood next to someone carrying a pistol in a grocery store line and watched nothing happen. They have never seen a neighbor with a rifle on his back walking to the range and observed that he made it there and back without injuring anyone. Their entire frame of reference for what a gun does in public comes from news coverage and political messaging, both of which select overwhelmingly for instances of violence.
Open carry changes that. Not immediately and not by itself, but over time and at scale. If you normalize the visible presence of firearms in American public life, you give non-gun owners a reference point that no argument can provide. You can explain gun rights to someone for an hour. You can cite Bruen, you can cite Heller, you can walk through the historical tradition from the colonial period to the present. Some people will nod along and walk away unconvinced because logic was never the real barrier. The barrier is an emotional and cultural unfamiliarity with guns as ordinary objects rather than instruments of death.
Exposure is what breaks that barrier. When someone lives near a guy who openly carries and that guy goes to work, picks up his kids, shops for groceries, and never once harms anyone, the abstraction collapses. The “guns kill people” frame requires that guns have some independent violent agency. Seeing them in use by ordinary people doing ordinary things dismantles that frame in a way that no op-ed ever will.
What Bruen did to every open carry ban in the country
The Bruen decision did not just change how courts evaluate gun laws. It changed what the government has to prove to defend one. Under the old means-end scrutiny framework, a state would argue that open carry bans served compelling interests and were narrowly tailored. Courts would weigh those arguments and frequently defer to the legislature.
Under Bruen, that analysis is gone. The government now has to demonstrate that its restriction is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” That means producing historical analogues from the founding era or the Reconstruction period that are relevantly similar in both burden and justification. Open carry bans have no analogues. The First DCA looked and found none. Florida could not produce them because they do not exist.
This has national implications. Any state currently enforcing an open carry ban is operating on borrowed time. Hawaii, California, New York, Illinois: none of them can produce historical evidence of a founding-era tradition of banning the open carrying of arms. The Florida settlement is the first formal state acknowledgment that the new framework makes these bans indefensible, but it will not be the last.
The GOA case is a model for how this gets won
Gun Owners of America filed in federal court, won at the district level, and positioned themselves so well that when the First DCA moved in McDaniels, the state had no defense left. GOA then collected its attorney fees. That sequence matters because it demonstrates how these cases should be run.
You file in the right court with the right plaintiffs under the right theory. You build the record. You demonstrate standing, you lay out the historical analysis, and you put the government in the position of having to produce evidence it does not have. When the government cannot defend the law, it pays and it walks away. The judgment or settlement then becomes the precedent that the next case builds on.
This is how the Second Amendment gets enforced state by state. Not through a single sweeping ruling that resolves everything at once, but through accumulated wins that make each subsequent case easier to argue and each subsequent unconstitutional law harder to defend.
Florida just gave us one of those wins. And the fact that some gun owners think it is not a big deal tells me we need to do a better job of explaining what we are actually fighting for. Open carry is not just a carry method. It is a statement about what kind of country this is and what kind of people we are. The founders understood that. The First District Court of Appeal understood that. Florida’s government, cornered by the law they could not defend, eventually understood that too.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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