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Shortly after Florida state lawmakers adjourned for the year, the state's Republican governor—Ron DeSantis—vowed to place his signature on legislation removing training and other requirements for residents to carry firearms in public.
"I can't tell you exactly when, but I'm pretty confident that I will be able to sign constitutional carry into law in the state of Florida," DeSantis said during an April news conference in the state.
"The Legislature will get it done. I can't tell you if it's going to be next week, six months, but I can tell you that before I am done as governor, we will have a signature on that bill," he added.
Entering 2023, DeSantis' best opportunity to finish the job might be at hand.
After an overwhelming performance in the state's recent elections, Florida Republicans now command supermajority control of both the Florida House and Senate, giving the GOP near-absolute control of the agenda coming out of Tallahassee over the next two years.
Expanding gun rights, gun control advocates fear, is likely to be among the GOP's top priorities when it returns to work this winter.
"We are going to be fighting this, and we're building a coalition to work with us to fight it, but it's going to be tough," Patti Brigham, president of Prevent Gun Violence Florida, told Newsweek in an interview. "Because we do have a much tougher landscape in the Florida Capitol now."
Newsweek has reached out to DeSantis' office about where permitless carry currently sits on his legislative to-do list—particularly as lawmakers begin preparing for a special session to address the state's flood insurance crisis following Hurricane Ian.
But recent history suggests Republicans are likely to pursue it aggressively.
Florida was the first state to implement "stand your ground" legislation, giving those who injure or kill someone with a firearm leeway if they claim they were acting in self-defense. To this day, the law remains on the books.
Residents can also carry firearms in their vehicle without a permit.
And while Florida does have laws on the books such as "red flag laws" and required waiting periods for firearm purchases, the laws are rife with loopholes, including language that allows unlicensed sellers to forgo waiting periods and background checks unless counties enact ordinances regulating them.
Given the environment in Florida, some say the next logical step appears to be allowing residents to carry arms without a permit.
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz—fresh off reelection—proposed making Florida a "constitutional carry" state in a recent tweet, drawing support from conservatives and scorn from others.
Jeremy T. Redfern, deputy press secretary for DeSantis, pointed to comments the governor recently delivered on constitutional carry in September, when he said, "Constitutional carry I've been in favor of the whole time. So, we think we'd be able to do that, but it really requires the Legislature to get it to my desk.
"I'm not the issue. I will sign it," DeSantis added.
While the gun control lobby has been able to find Republicans to work with in the past to defeat legislation allowing open carry on campuses, Brigham said the landscape of the Legislature changed dramatically in the last election, including with the defeat of several key legislators who represented the face of the resistance in Tallahassee.
Among the vanquished are Orlando Democrat Carlos Guillermo Smith, a sitting state lawmaker who recently lost the election in his dramatically redrawn district to a Republican.
Smith, the first openly gay Latino elected to the Florida Legislature, ran his initial campaign around gun control reforms following the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, and has since become one of the Legislature's most vocal proponents of gun control in the Statehouse.
Smith told Newsweek after struggling to get his colleagues to vote for a moment of silence for the Pulse nightclub shooting victims in his freshman term, he found an increasing level of common ground with Republicans in the wake of a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
The result was passage of some gun reforms that came with other, Republican-backed provisions, like arming teachers.
But in the age of DeSantis, Smith says that goodwill has all but dissipated.
"I've seen a handful of Republican lawmakers who are willing to work across the aisle to try to enact some gun safety measures, but that has since shifted," said Smith. "Republicans are not willing to defy Governor Ron DeSantis on any topic, or any subject. Republicans are becoming totally in lockstep with him."
While supermajorities can occasionally lead to factional politics within a party—and grant the Legislature the power to override a governor's vetoes—Smith said he believes the supermajority has actually given DeSantis more power.
He noted that Republicans failed to intervene when DeSantis sought to insert himself into the state's recent redistricting process.
"They're afraid to defy him for fear of retribution," Smith said in an interview.
Still, Republicans in the Florida Statehouse are likely to see some pushback.
While permitless carry has grown in prevalence around the country in recent years, recent polling by the University of South Florida over the summer showed a vast majority of voters from both parties support stricter gun controls in the state.
Meanwhile, additional polling by gun safety group Giffords found nearly two-thirds of all voters oppose permitless carry—well above the 50-50 split reported in Tampa Bay Times polling prior to high-profile shootings at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and at the Pulse nightclub in 2018 and 2016, respectively.
But there are also tangible impacts.
Research by Everytown, a gun violence reduction organization, has argued states that weakened their firearm permitting systems experienced a 13-15 percent increase in violent crime.
Others, including longtime Miami PD officer David Magnusson, have penned op-eds opposing permitless carry, while the state's leading law enforcement organizations have all expressed opposition to previous proposals they said could make their jobs more challenging.
"Governor DeSantis has long claimed to support law enforcement, but his determination to gut Florida's concealed handgun carry license system suggests the exact opposite," said Beth DuMond, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action in Florida.
"Law enforcement in Florida and across the country have been clear that permitless carry will only make it more difficult and more dangerous for them to protect our communities. After all of the recent tragedies we've seen across the country, the last thing Florida needs is permitless carry," DuMond added.
Others have long expressed concerns permitless carry could cast a shadow over the state's robust tourism industry in ways that might not be fully realized.
"You've got tourists from all over the world coming here to visit Disney and the other theme parks, all the beaches...just imagine, say tourists from European countries coming here and seeing all of these people openly carrying guns," said Brigham. "That would be a terrible idea for the state of Florida."
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more