Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Friday that his office considers the state’s 2018 ban on bump stocks unconstitutional and will no longer defend convictions obtained under the law.
Uthmeier made the announcement in a post on X, where he laid out his office’s reasoning in an attached legal opinion. “People are being arrested and prosecuted under a 2018 law that banned ‘bump stocks,'” he wrote. “As currently written, the overly broad law appears to restrict the use of trigger enhancements used by firearms owners for lawful purposes, subjecting them to five years in prison.”
In the opinion, Uthmeier argued that bump stocks serve legitimate purposes beyond mere rate-of-fire increases. “Bump stocks are widely used for lawful purposes including self-defense; indeed, their very creation was spurred to help disabled Americans,” he wrote.
He also pointed to Supreme Court precedent in support of his position. “In United States v. Miller, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects not just operable weapons but also the supplementary equipment carried on the person that is useful for a firearm’s operation,” Uthmeier wrote.
The attorney general’s opinion further states that a bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic firearm into a machine gun, and that a ban targeting the accessory cannot withstand the test set out by the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision. “A bump stock falls within the ‘Arms’ protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment,” he wrote.
“Today, my office issued a legal opinion recognizing the law as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, and this office will not defend a conviction under the statute going forward,” Uthmeier wrote.
The move means Florida prosecutors can expect no backing from the attorney general’s office in cases brought under the 2018 statute, which carries a potential five-year prison sentence for those convicted.
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