By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog
Last week the state appeals court for Broward County, where the 2018 Parkland school massacre took place, ruled that kids as young as convicted killer Nikolas Cruz have the right to walk around with concealed weapons.
Cruz was 19 when he murdered 17 students and staff members and wounded 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; he’s serving 34 consecutive life terms. Soon after the mass shooting, the Florida Legislature passed and then-Gov. Rick Scott signed limited gun reforms, also leaving intact a 1987 law that barred adults ages 18, 19 and 20 from bearing hidden weapons.
Now those youths are free to roam unregulated thanks to the Fourth District Court of Appeal (4th DCA) and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier.
“Restricting 18- to 20-year-olds — members of the same ‘political community’ as other law-abiding adults — from rights to self-defense would make the Second Amendment a ‘second-class’ right,” Judge Spencer Levine wrote June 17 for a unanimous panel with Chief Judge Jeffrey Kuntz and Judge Shannon Shaw.
[President Trump nominated Kuntz for a seat on South Florida’s federal bench in April. On Monday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send Kuntz’s name to the full Senate for confirmation.]
Uthmeier praised the ruling as “another win for the unalienable rights of Floridians.” Instead of defending the nearly 40-year-old concealed carry law, which he could have done, Uthmeier urged the court to scrap it. He isn’t taking an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court on behalf of the state.
Uthmeier is a former chief of staff to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who calls concealed carry “constitutional carry.” So the attorney general’s opposition to gun control was predictable, especially given that he’s a right-wing Republican campaigning to keep his job.
DESANTIS CHANGES HIS TUNE
Still, as the state’s designated “chief legal officer,” Uthmeier isn’t supposed to pick which laws to defend and which to denounce, according to state Rep. Dan Daley, D-Coral Springs.
“Florida’s Attorney General is not defending state law, he is helping clear the path for it to be struck down,” Daley said before the June 17 ruling. “His job is to defend Florida law, not abandon reasonable safety measures while he is running for office. That kind of political calculation is making Florida more dangerous for our children, our schools, and our communities.”
DeSantis has suspended several elected officials around the state for doing exactly what Uthmeier did.
In August 2022, he suspended Hillsborough County’s State Attorney Andrew Warren for neglect of duty after Warren signed a public pledge not to prosecute women who seek an abortion or doctors who provide abortions. One year later, he suspended Orlando area state attorney Monique Worrell for the same reason after accusing her of allowing “violent criminals to escape the full consequences of their criminal conduct.”
“State Attorneys have a duty to prosecute crimes as defined in Florida law, not to pick and choose which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,” DeSantis said in a press release when he suspended Warren.
Nevertheless, the governor has chosen not to suspend Uthmeier.
Cathy Swerdlow, who chairs a gun violence-prevention team for the League of Women Voters’ Florida chapter, said Uthmeier is “undermining the work that so many people have done to make our community safer.”
“The only movement we got was as a result of Parkland, the legislation that came forth in 2018, and this year we have watched this unelected attorney general just try his best to dismantle everything,” she said. DeSantis tapped Uthmeier to succeed Ashley Moody as attorney general after her election to the U.S. Senate in November 2024.
PRYOR VS UTHMEIER IN 4TH DCA
Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor wasn’t obligated to join in the gun law appeal Eubanks v. Florida, but he stepped up anyway. He explained why to the 4th DCA in a formally written brief that boils down to this: Somebody’s gotta do it.
Coral Springs officers responding to a call about a kid holding a gun found Jaylen Eubanks, 18, with a handgun tucked into his waistband. He was charged with illegal possession of a concealed weapon.
When Broward Circuit Judge Lorena Mastrarrigo ruled that the concealed carry law applies to Eubanks, he pleaded guilty but reserved the right to appeal her decision.
Normally in a criminal appeal the attorney general’s solicitor speaks for the state and argues in favor of upholding the law in question. Not this time – Uthmeier’s office “conceded error,” agreeing with Eubanks that the concealed carry law breaches his Second Amendment rights.
At that point, prosecutors in Pryor’s office who’d handled the Eubanks case asked, along with their boss, if they could stay on the case and represent the state in the appeal. The attorney general’s office denied the request.
“Given the impact of gun crimes in the State of Florida – including the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in our community … we respectfully disagree with the position taken by the Office of the Attorney General,” Pryor said in a statement released to the media.
Then he asked the 4th DCA for permission to submit a friend-of-the-court brief and that request was granted. Pryor felt compelled to intervene because, the brief suggests, “the public interest of the people of Broward County and the State of Florida in upholding the statute needs to be presented and considered by this Honorable Court.”
The gist of his argument is that research shows youths 18 through 20 commit a disproportionate share of gun homicides – 18 percent, though they’re just four percent of the U.S. population. In Florida they’re “identified as perpetrators in fatal shootings at nearly twice the rate of people in their twenties and three times the rate of people in their thirties,” according to data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the brief says.
Ultimately the state attorney wound up supporting the concealed carry law in opposition to the attorney general. The 4th DCA agreed with Uthmeier, the state lost, and yet the state’s chief legal officer proclaimed victory in the court of public opinion.
FLORIDA FAILS NEWTOWN TEST
In Connecticut, families of nine victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that took the lives of 20 first-graders and six adults in 2012 achieved a record $73 million settlement with Remington Arms Co. in 2022.
In Florida, however, it’s inconceivable that a lawsuit against the gun industry could be successful.
Civil lawsuits destroyed Remington, maker of the rifle used in the slaughter of Sandy Hook innocents that briefly drew national attention to Newtown, CT. President Obama wept when he went there to comfort survivors.
“This case is a wake-up call for the gun industry – act recklessly and illegally, and you will be held accountable,” Eric Tirschwell said in a statement about the settlement. He is chief litigation counsel of Everytown Law, part of Everytown for Gun Safety, the biggest U.S. nonprofit working to prevent gun violence.
But Newtown’s spirited search for accountability hasn’t touched Florida, where the gun industry enjoys immunity that’s only toughened over the years since “Parkland” dominated headlines, gun control advocates say.
In 2023 the 4th DCA helped nip a Newtown-like effort in the bud. Fred and Jennifer Guttenberg, parents of 14-year-old Parkland victim Jaime Guttenberg, wanted to sue Smith & Wesson Corp. and Sunrise Tactical Supply. Smith & Wesson made and Sunrise Tactical Supply sold the M&P15 semi-automatic rifle Nikolas Cruz used to kill their daughter.
Standing in their way was a huge financial roadblock, a state law directing any plaintiff that sues a member of the gun industry and loses due to immunity to pay the defendant’s fees and costs and even compensate the company for lost income.
The Guttenbergs sought a judicial declaration that the law doesn’t bar claims by individuals based on “the design, marketing, distribution, or sale of firearms to the public.” Alternatively, they asked for a declaration that the law violates the Constitution by limiting the public’s right of access to the courts.
The courts, both trial and appellate, responded by refusing to declare anything. The Guttenbergs wanted a speculative “advisory opinion” and that’s not allowed because courts must decide only active cases or matters where the plaintiff requires a decision now to avoid injury later, the 4th DCA ruled.
“While one may seek a declaration of his or her rights without an allegation of actual injury, an aggrieved party must nonetheless make some showing of a real threat of immediate injury, rather than a general, speculative fear of harm that may possibly occur at some time in the indefinite future,” Judge Alan Forst wrote. Judges Melanie May and Dorian Damoorgian agreed.
Consequently, the Guttenbergs would have to gamble by filing a lawsuit in order to test the risk of filing a lawsuit. Apparently they haven’t done so; neither Fred Guttenberg nor his Miami lawyer Stephen Rosenthal responded to a request for comment.
An empty, landscaped lot has replaced bullet-riddled Building 1200 on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The Parkland 17 Memorial is a mile away at a nature preserve on the border of Parkland and Coral Springs.
Cathy Swerdlow of the League of Women Voters said she’s concerned about mobilizing for gun reform eight years after Parkland.
“Now that the building isn’t there and people’s recollections are fading, I think there’s less political will because of the distance from the event and the fact that these things happen so routinely,” she said. “This normalization of gun violence is hard to overcome.”
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