While Republican leaders in the Legislature supported a permitless carry law last year that allows people to carry concealed weapons without a government-issued license, House Speaker Paul Renner and especially Senate President Kathleen Passidomo resisted loosening other gun regulations in the Sunshine State during their two-year reign in power.
One such proposal is known as “open carry” — the wearing or carrying of a firearm in a clearly visible manner. Florida is one of four states that bans open carrying of guns.
Gun-rights advocates, weary of fighting the Legislature for that idea, filed a lawsuit in federal court this week attempting to overturn Florida’s open carry ban, but those same advocates also say that they’re reaching out to members of the House and Senate about getting a bill filed for the 2025 legislative session that would do the same thing.
“We’re already talking to lawmakers to introduce legislation next session,” said Luis Valdes, Florida state chair of Gun Owners of America. “We never give up the fight.”
The effort comes with renewed optimism with new leadership taking over the Florida Legislature later this year: Miami-Dade’s Daniel Perez in the House and Central Florida Republican Ben Albritton in the Senate.
“We’ve been having conversations with the new incoming Senate president and, while he’s not made any commitments, I think he’s going to be much more open to at least allowing pro-Second Amendment legislation to be heard,” said Bob White, chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus.
“And of course last session and the session before, President Passidomo just had an almost outright ban on Second Amendment bills even being heard, much less passed. So I’m optimistic that we might see some progress next year.”
Senate reluctance
Passidomo’s resistance was reflected in the fate of proposals that attempted to chip away at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, passed just weeks after the tragic shootings in Parkland that killed 17 people in February 2018.
In both 2023 and 2024 sessions, the Florida House passed bills that would have lowered the age for Floridians to buy a long gun from a federally licensed dealer from 21 to 18. On both occasions, not only did the Senate not follow suit, but no members even filed a companion bill.
Similarly, a measure that would have repealed a part of the 2018 legislation requiring that there either be a mandatory three-day waiting period to purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer or a forced wait for a completed background check was also passed in the House, but never received a committee vote in the Senate earlier this year.
The permitless carry bill was part of the wish list that Gov. Ron DeSantis supported during the 2023 session, which saw major reforms passed by the Legislature in other areas in the months leading to the governor’s presidential run. But not open carry, much to the consternation of the gun-rights groups.
In the middle of that session, then-Hillsborough County Republican House member Mike Beltran filed an open carry amendment but immediate pushback from GOP leaders forced him to withdraw his bill the next day.
“I had the [GOP] leadership and my caucus and the NRA who were all against the open carry amendment. They were all against it,” Beltran recounted. “In fairness, they thought the [permitless concealed carry] bill was going to the Senate and then Passidomo wasn’t going to hear it, and it was going to upset this very delicate deal that they made” for the Senate to pass permitless carry — a deal, he added, that neither he nor other House members were consulted about.
Speaker Renner told him he should withdraw the bill and then run it during the 2024 session, Beltran said. Which is what Beltran did but, he said, again there was no support from House leadership. “He didn’t return my call. And so obviously the bill didn’t go through.”
Missing in this discussion is where exactly Gov. DeSantis was in all of this back and forth. The governor was captured in an audio recording telling Valdes in March 2023 that while he “absolutely” supported open carry, he didn’t think the Legislature would vote for it.
“The point is, if DeSantis had said to do it, I think Renner and for that matter Passidomo would have been hard pressed to say no,” said Beltran, who decided earlier this year not to run for re-election to his Hillsborough County House seat.
“And he didn’t lean in at that point, and that was when he was at the height of his power. It wasn’t like they were going to draw a big line in the sand at that. He was getting all kinds of things at that point. They certainly could have done it.”
Sheriffs’ opposition
Historically on this issue, one reason the Legislature has been hesitant to support open carry is because of opposition from the powerful Florida Sheriffs Association.
Former St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar, now running in the Republican state Senate primary election in Senate District 7 in Northeast Florida, said he used to be against open carry but now supports the idea.
“I actually used to be firmly against it, and part of that was that back in the day a great deal of law enforcement officers were being killed by their own handguns,” he said. “Now, that changed as our holstering and our training changed. So, I was leery of it for that purpose, but I’m really not now.”
“If Republicans want to prove how pro-gun they are, they could pass legislation and moot our case,” Valdes said. “But they haven’t passed open carry over the years, so we’re going to fight it tooth and nail, no matter what.”
Florida Democratic Senate hopeful Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is an advocate for gun safety legislation. She lost her father to gun violence back in Ecuador, and opposes the idea of allowing for open carry in Florida.
“Florida leads the nation in mass shootings in 2024,” she told the Phoenix in a text message. “We should be focused on ways to make our communities safer and to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.”
Mucarsel-Powell calls lawmakers who support open carry “extremists in Tallahassee who want to keep our communities less safe. They don’t care about stopping violent crime, making our kids feel safe at school, or protecting the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every day to stop gun violence in our communities.”
The Phoenix reached out to incoming House Speaker Perez and incoming Senate President Albritton, but did not receive responses.