How a July 4th Arrest Changed Florida Gun Law Forever
The First District Court of Appeal’s unanimous decision on Sept. 10 in McDaniels v. State of Florida has transformed gun rights in the Sunshine State. What began as a simple arrest during a political campaign has evolved into a case that overturned Florida’s open carry prohibition and reshaped constitutional law.
- Pensacola attorney Chris Crawford, who represented Stan McDaniels through both trial and appellate levels, recently shared the remarkable story behind this landmark case in an interview.
The Arrest That Started It All
The case originated on what seemed like an ordinary day of political campaigning. Stan McDaniels was running for office in Escambia County and decided to spend July 4th promoting his candidacy at the corner of Baylen and Main streets.
- “There’s kind of a grass area down there, and he is holding out signs promoting his race in the election,” Crawford explained. “When he is doing that, he had a handgun in his waistband. He had a T-shirt on, and, at times, you could see roughly three to four inches of the handle of the handgun.”
McDaniels wasn’t looking for trouble. “He wasn’t down there with any intent on getting arrested. He personally believed that the Second Amendment gave him an absolute right to carry a firearm. He had a concealed carry license. He was legally allowed to carry a firearm. He wasn’t doing anything illegal at the time.”
- When someone spotted the visible gun handle and called police, officers arrived and tried to resolve the situation peacefully. “They honestly tried to dissuade him and to just cover up the handle,” Crawford recalled. “And he kept on saying, ‘I don’t have to. Here’s the constitution. He had the constitution in his hand.’”
An Unlikely Partnership
When he heard about the arrest, the case didn’t grab his attention. “I wasn’t personally interested in gun advocate rights,” he admitted. “I believe in the Second Amendment. I own firearms… but I wasn’t someone who was well read on the history of gun laws or anything like that.”
Everything changed when Eric Friday called. Crawford describes Friday as “the genius of Florida gun laws, national gun laws,” who had, for 15 years, argued that “open carry is actually the constitutional method of carry.”
- Background: Eric Friday is a prominent constitutional attorney based in Jacksonville. He is the general counsel for Florida Carry, Inc., the state’s largest independent pro-Second Amendment organization.
The late-night phone call that changed everything lasted three hours. “We’re going through all these cases and statutes and cases all over the country. And during that conversation, I realized this guy was right, that he was 100% right. That open carry is the constitutional method.”
The Flawed Law
Crawford discovered that Florida’s existing gun laws were fundamentally broken from the start.
“Under the old law, if I brought a shotgun, if I brought my grandfather’s shotgun down to the gunsmith on Garden Street,” he shared. “If I’m walking that shotgun into a store or out of the store, I was committing a crime. That’s how the old law was written. It was ridiculous.”
The attorney explained that the original law “was really a political deal between the NRA and the state of Florida, and it was never workable.”
Crawford said, “It was never a good law. It was always broken because it was always unconstitutional.”
A Strategic Prosecution Decision
The attorney explained that the trial almost didn’t happen. McDaniels was charged with a second-degree misdemeanor—a relatively minor offense.
- “The vast majority of the time, no one is going to jail for a second-degree misdemeanor,” Crawford said. “At any point in time, Escambia’s State Attorney’s office could have dismissed this case…and we would’ve never had this opinion that now completely changes this constitutional law, but they didn’t do it.”
Crawford revealed other counties had taken a different approach: “Eric Friday represented people in other counties where, when he would show up in the case, they would dismiss it because these other counties did not want it to go the way that it went here.”
The Trial Strategy
The trial presented a unique challenge—Crawford and his team actually needed to lose at the trial level to reach the appellate court where constitutional questions could be definitively resolved.
“This is probably one of the first trials in my life where part of the things that we’re trying to do is actually not win the trial because if we would’ve won the trial, we would’ve never had the ability to appeal,” Crawford explained. “I’m not saying that I intentionally threw the trial; it’s not at all what happened… but that was one of the things that was also in [McDaniels’] mind, ‘Hey, we have to make sure that the record’s correct.’”
The Supreme Court’s Bruen Decision Changes Everything
The legal landscape shifted dramatically with the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Crawford explained how Justice Anthony Scalia’s reasoning changed Second Amendment analysis:
“Up until this point, we’ve been doing this balancing act with the Second Amendment, whether the government’s interest outweighs the interest of the citizen. And what Scalia basically said is we’re dealing with a right that has this inherent story of fighting the government. So why would we then allow the government to do this balancing?”
Instead of balancing tests, Scalia said the new standard should focus on historical precedent: “What we’re going to do is we’re going to go look back at what the historical regulation of basically firearms were. And if it wasn’t a historical regulation, we’re not going to allow it.”
The Historic Oral Argument
The appellate hearing itself was extraordinary. Crawford said, “When they allowed us to do oral argument, which is very rare… we knew we had a chance when they allowed argument.”
- The setting added to the moment’s significance. Initially scheduled for the First District Court of Appeal (DCA) courthouse in Tallahassee, the hearing was moved to Florida State University’s law school. “The courtroom that we argued, this was let’s just say the original DCA courtroom… So we knew, being there, that somebody considered this important. And it was filmed.”
The state’s failure to present historical evidence proved crucial. “They did not present a single historical case that said concealed carry was right, open carry was wrong. So even the judges are looking back at the record from the trial level and saying, ‘There was nothing here, guys.’”
- Crawford said that the ruling returns to historical norms rather than creating something new: “Historically, the only people who carried weapons in a concealed manner were people who were planning on doing bad things with them. If you were not planning on doing something bad with something you had, why would you not just show it openly?”
A Moment in Legal History
Reflecting on the experience, Crawford was clearly moved by participating in such a significant case: “I left the hearing feeling in awe.”
He praised the appellate judges. “These people who absolutely should be there, brilliant people. They were very professional and gracious. It was an amazing moment.”
- Crawford concluded: “It was a wild time. It was a wild story, and I would’ve never thought, seeing it in the news, that this guy getting arrested, that I was going to be involved.”
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