By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Publix shoppers may want to keep track of more than BOGOs now that customers can stroll grocery aisles toting guns and knives like they’re roaming the range in the wild, wild West.
The Lakeland-based chain recently welcomed “open carry” enthusiasts, explaining that Publix is following the law. Last month an appeals court struck Florida’s longstanding open-carry ban, effectively approving the policy.
While the ruling delights gun-rights fans, it alarms law enforcement officers. They’ve had to deal with the stand-your-ground (SYG) defense for 20 years; open carry will only make their jobs harder.
Florida is compromising public safety by piling open carry onto SYG, according to Adam Skaggs, chief counsel for the national Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“They’re greenlighting carrying guns in public, which may have an increased risk of making people feel threatened,” he said. “And if ‘stand your ground’ says go ahead and use lethal force, it’s pretty easy to see how things could go wrong.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis hailed the Sept.10 court ruling, posting on X that it “aligns state policy with my long-held position and with the vast majority of states throughout the union. Ultimately, the court correctly ruled that the text of the Second Amendment – ‘to keep and bear arms’ – says what it means and means what it says.”
But some current and former prosecutors are less bullish about open carry. They anticipate greater strain on law enforcement, already weakened by the SYG defense Florida launched nationally in 2005.
Broward County State Attorney Harold Pryor acknowledged in a statement that open carry “presents additional challenges” for his office. “Gun crime is one of my biggest public safety concerns,” he said. “We will continue to follow the law and our prosecutors will review the evidence and all relevant circumstances on a case-by-case basis.”
Penny Brill, a former Miami-Dade County prosecutor, said she expects open carry to foster a “more wild west” climate. “I think you’re gonna see a lot more killings that are heat-of-the-moment, where people get into an argument and before they have a chance to cool down, they shoot,” she said.
Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County State Attorney from 2013 until this January, compared open carry unfavorably to the old concealed-carry policy.
“My concern is, now that you can wear a firearm out in the open in Publix, an encounter that would otherwise be brushed off will lead to a gun being pulled. Whereas if it’s locked in a holster on your ankle, it’s less likely for you to grab,” said Aronberg, now a West Palm Beach trial lawyer with his own firm.
SCOTUS TAKES A GUN CASE
Publix, a private business, can decide for itself what kind of customer gear is unacceptable. In fact, four years ago the company asked shoppers to leave their weapons behind. Publix spokesperson Lindsey Willis did not respond to Florida Bulldog’s emailed questions about changing policies for mixing greens and guns.
Giffords’s Skaggs suggested Publix might suffer competitively by letting customers show their firearms while Winn-Dixie, for example, continues banning open carry.
“They’re within their rights, but one wonders what the Publix customer base will think about going to buy a gallon of milk and half the shoppers are toting guns around the aisles,” he said. “It’ll certainly be interesting to see what the impact on their business will be.”
Now that some form of open carry is legal in nearly all states, a gun case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this term, Wolford v. Lopez, is getting considerable attention. It’s a challenge to a Hawaiian law that criminalizes concealing handguns at retail businesses unless their owners give explicit consent.
“In a lot of states, if you operate a supermarket, customers are allowed to bring guns into the store unless you have a no-guns sign, and then if they try, that’s trespassing and you can call the cops,” Skaggs said. “The question is, do private businesses have to allow gun-carrying unless they post a sign?”
“Would you, as a customer, rather see a sign showing a gun with a slash through it, or would you rather assume there are no guns unless there’s a welcoming sign?” he asked.
Skaggs said Giffords plans to file an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to set a default for retailers of no guns allowed. That would mean upholding Hawaii’s consent-through-signage requirement.
Given the court’s recent expansion of Second Amendment rights, however, it will be surprising if Hawaii’s law survives.
‘A LICENSE TO KILL’
In 2005, when Republican Jeb Bush was governor, the National Rifle Association’s perennial lobbying efforts paid off hugely. Florida became the first state to expand self-defense laws so they cover the use of deadly force in public places to counteract “reasonable” threats. No retreat is required.
Before that, the only justification for a lethal face-off was protecting one’s home, or “castle.” When SYG became law the castle grew legs, leaving a limited number of public spaces — courthouses, polling places, police stations, schools — as weapon-free zones.
In 2012, the fatal shooting in Sanford of African American Trayvon Martin, 17, by a Hispanic neighborhood sentry named George Zimmerman, tested Florida’s criminal justice system. SYG prevented prosecutors from charging Zimmerman initially, but later he was tried for manslaughter in Seminole County and acquitted.
When SYG had been stress-tested in courts long enough to develop a track record, the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety and the Tampa Bay Times conducted research and reported the startling results: In 79 percent of Florida SYG cases, the person who invoked it could have retreated to avoid violence, the newspaper found; in 68 percent, an unarmed person was killed.
The Trayvon Martin shooting seems to check both boxes. Zimmerman could have retreated before confronting the “suspicious,” hoodie-wearing teen, who was unarmed and just walking home from a 7-Eleven.
Instead, evidence showed that Zimmerman started a fight and shot Martin in the chest. Following his acquittal an uproar about racial profiling and SYG shook Florida and the nation for months.
Everytown reported in 2019 that SYG had been linked to a 32 percent spike in the national homicide rate. “‘Stand Your Ground’ laws are a license to kill” is the headline of Everytown’s latest update, released in July. Today at least 38 states have SYG laws or enabling court rulings.
Aronberg said his experience with SYG gives him hope the open-carry policy will be applied judiciously.
He said during his 12 years as Palm Beach County state attorney, SYG put prosecutors “behind the eight ball” because defense lawyers would try to use it to fend off legitimate charges.
So he was “pleasantly surprised” that judges generally refused to dismiss charges on the basis of SYG, preferring to let juries decide those cases. “Unless there were some real questions, there was no immunity from prosecution,” Aronberg said.
OPEN CARRY BAN FOUND UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Open-carry advocates need not fear that the Florida Supreme Court will overturn the gun-friendly Sept. 10 ruling. Attorney General James Uthmeier applauded the First District Court of Appeal’s (1st DCA’s) decision and declined to appeal it to the high court.
The case began with a political campaign. On July 4, 2022 Stanley McDaniels, a Republican running for the Escambia County Commission, filmed himself standing at an intersection in downtown Pensacola.
He wasn’t threatening anyone out loud; he was waving at cars and holding a copy of the U.S. Constitution — with a loaded Beretta pistol tucked into his waistband for all to see.
McDaniels was arrested and found guilty of violating Florida’s Open Carry Ban. The trial judge paused his sentence of probation and community service and referred the case to the 1st DCA.
There a three-judge panel found the ban unconstitutional, supported by “no historical tradition. To the contrary, history confirms that the right to bear arms in public necessarily includes the right to do so openly,” Judge Stephanie Ray wrote in a unanimous decision joined by Judges Lori Rowe and M. Kemmerly Thomas.
“That is not to say that open carry is absolute or immune from reasonable regulation,” the ruling continues. “But what the state may not do is extinguish the right altogether for ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens.”
McDaniels won that court battle but has not gone on to greater glory. He lost his 2022 bid to run as the Republican candidate for the Escambia commission seat and he’s mounted another failed campaign since then.
This year McDaniels was convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, according to WLRN. He began serving his three-month sentence in September and is expected to be released in January. He gave a jailhouse video interview to a reporter from Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
“The secret war being fought with pen and paper in local, state and federal courtrooms has taken a major turn to restore our God-given constitutional rights with recent Supreme Court decisions,” McDaniels told Fresh Take Florida.
Ironically, he can’t personally enjoy his victory, the report noted. Because of his domestic violence conviction, federal law prevents McDaniels from possessing a gun.
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