Florida Attorney General Says the State's 2018 Bump Stock Ban Violates the Second Amendment and Won't Defend Convictions

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier concluded in a six-page legal opinion dated November 13, 2026 that the state’s ban on bump-fire stocks violates the Second Amendment, and his office said it will not defend any conviction under the statute. The opinion, first reported by AmmoLand and posted as page images on X at 2:44 p.m., answers one question of law, whether the prohibition in section 790.222 of the Florida Statutes contravenes the Second Amendment. “After careful consideration, I have determined that it does,” Uthmeier wrote.

Section 790.222 bars anyone from importing, transferring, distributing, selling, keeping for sale, possessing or giving another person a bump-fire stock, a third-degree felony. It defines the term as a conversion kit, tool, accessory or device used to alter a firearm’s rate of fire to mimic automatic fire, or to fire faster than a person could unassisted. The Legislature passed it in March 2018 as section 13 of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, Senate Bill 7026, which cleared the House 67 to 50 and became Chapter 2018-3 when Gov. Rick Scott signed it on March 9, 2018.

Uthmeier’s opinion first explains the mechanics. A bump stock replaces a rifle’s stock with a casing that lets the rifle slide back and forth so recoil resets the trigger against a stationary finger, and each function of the trigger still fires one round. The opinion leans on the Supreme Court’s June 14, 2024 decision in Garland v. Cargill, which held that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun under the National Firearms Act because it does not fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger.

From there the opinion applies the two-step test of Bruen and this year’s Wolford v. Lopez. Semiautomatic firearms with bump stocks and similar modifications are bearable arms covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text, Uthmeier wrote, and the burden shifts to the government to show a historical tradition of banning components that merely speed a trigger’s reset. He found none. Repeating arms are not new, he wrote, and nineteenth-century lever-action and revolving arms fired faster than the muzzleloaders before them, while laws on dangerous conduct or sensitive places establish no tradition of banning firearm accessories. He rejected the argument that bump stocks are dangerous and unusual, citing an ATF estimate that more than 500,000 bump-fire stock devices are in private circulation and grouping them with trigger lightening kits, buffer weights and springs and short or forced reset triggers as widely available components. The opinion notes that bump stocks were created to help disabled shooters and that federal law allowed transfers of registered machine guns to civilians until 1986.

The opinion adds a limit. Nothing in it means the government could never regulate devices that truly convert semiautomatic firearms into machine guns, Uthmeier wrote, but that is not what bump stocks do. He also answered Scott’s remark at the 2018 signing that all sides had to give a little, writing that “the Constitution, however, brooks little compromise when it comes to citizens’ fundamental rights.”

The conclusion is the operative part. “Section 790.222 therefore violates the Second Amendment and cannot be lawfully enforced by Executive Branch officials in Florida. This Office will not defend a conviction under section 790.222,” the opinion ends. In the X post announcing it, Uthmeier said people are being arrested and prosecuted under the 2018 law and that, as written, the overly broad statute appears to restrict trigger enhancements that gun owners use for lawful purposes, exposing them to five years in prison.

The statute itself is unchanged. Uthmeier’s office lists the document among its advisory legal opinions, and only the Legislature or a court can remove section 790.222 from the books. That commitment binds the attorney general’s own office, which handles criminal appeals for the state, and it does not direct the state attorneys who file charges in Florida’s 20 judicial circuits, so a charge under the statute remains possible until a court rules or lawmakers act. The office’s Nov. 6 memorandum on short-barreled rifles took the same approach to section 790.221, telling police that possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle is not a state crime while federal rules still apply.