AG James Uthmeier breaks precedent on nonviolent felon gun rights

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier did something last month that doesn’t happen often in politics. He broke with every previous Florida Attorney General and reversed the office’s long-standing position on felon-in-possession of a firearm – rightfully so.

In the case of Morgan v. State of Florida, Uthmeier reversed his own office’s position and argued that Florida’s blanket ban on firearm possession by all convicted felons is unconstitutional when applied to people convicted of nonviolent offenses. The Second Amendment, he wrote, permits the government to disarm felons whose convictions show they are dangerous, but not all felons as a categorical matter. In a supplemental brief, Uthmeier applied the Supreme Court’s text-and-history test to argue that firearm prohibitions for nonviolent felons cannot be justified.

That’s a correct reading of the Constitution, one that is long overdue.

This problem is bigger than most people are ready to face. More than 3,000 people are arrested every year in Florida under state statute 790.23 for unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. In just the first seven months of this fiscal year, roughly 1,146 people were sent to prison. This single offense accounts for nearly 88% of all weapons-related prison commitments in the state.

A substantial number of those people were originally convicted of nonviolent felonies. National data from a 2025 U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief found that of nearly 28,500 people prosecuted under the federal equivalent of this charge, roughly 44% had no prior conviction for a violent crime or drug offense.

Their disqualifying felony was a property crime, a regulatory violation, or something that in another state might not even be a felony.

Applied to Florida’s numbers, somewhere between 600 and 1,300 people per year are being arrested and incarcerated in this state for possessing a firearm while having a nonviolent record.

For context, I present the types of offenses we are discussing here. Christopher Morgan, the man at the center of this case, was convicted in Pennsylvania of carrying a firearm without a state license. That’s it. A third-degree felony for something that isn’t even a crime in Florida or much of the country anymore.

Years later, Morgan was honest with a police officer during a traffic stop about the unloaded Glock in his console, and he was arrested for it.

Bryan Range, the plaintiff in a landmark 3rd Circuit case, lost his gun rights after pleading guilty to making a false statement on a food stamp application. He was making $9 an hour, trying to raise three kids on $300 a week. That conviction followed him for decades and barred him from ever owning a firearm. In Florida, you can be charged with a third-degree felony, which is the same level of offense, for selling an illegally taken deer or tampering with spiny lobster trap tags.

One bad decision, one regulatory violation, and you permanently lose your constitutional right to self-defense.

These are the offenses that the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association says should keep people disarmed for life. Their brief argues that “from a constitutional perspective, all felons are dangerous felons.” We expect that this position would be disturbing to Second Amendment supporters; it should be offensive to anyone who cares about the Constitution.

The crucial part of the story that is often lost is this: many of the people caught by these laws come from communities that are already heavily impacted by violence. They were raised in environments where violence wasn’t rare; it was routine. Their families have lived it, not just heard about it. Losing children, parents, siblings, cousins, friends. Some have been victims themselves.

After repaying a debt to society for a nonviolent offense, they are released right back into those same communities, without the legal ability to protect themselves or their families. In many cases, individuals with felony records work in cash-based economies, which makes them targets for violence because they are perceived to be unarmed and are less likely to call the police.

Think about that. A young man commits a nonviolent felony at 19. He does his time. He comes home to the same neighborhood where his brother was shot, where his mother’s house was broken into, and where the homicide rate hasn’t gone down. He has rebuilt his life. He is not a danger to anyone. But the state says he cannot legally own a firearm to protect the people he loves, not for five years, not for 10 years, but permanently, unless he navigates a clemency process so broken that people wait a decade or more with no action.

Many of the people most impacted by this law are not the people most likely to commit violence. They are the people most likely to need protection from it.

The prosecutors opposing the AG are making the wrong argument. The Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association wants the court to uphold the blanket ban and says that distinguishing between dangerous and non-dangerous felons is “contrived and forced.” Let’s be real; treating a man who lied on a food stamp application the same way you would someone convicted of armed robbery isn’t principle, it’s the same type of profound laziness that has created mass incarceration.

We’ve seen where that logic leads. The War on Drugs used the same reasoning. Treat all offenders the same, lock them up and sort it out later. It didn’t make communities safer; it filled prisons without addressing the root causes of what was happening in those communities. Most Americans now recognize the cost of that approach.

Gun laws are following the same path. In Chicago, 80% of people arrested for simple illegal possession of a firearm were Black, overwhelmingly Black men. While those possession arrests climbed, so did shootings, but arrests for the actual shootings declined. The same pattern played out in New York and Baltimore. Criminalizing possession without distinguishing between dangerous people and everyone else doesn’t reduce violence. It just fills prisons with people from the communities already hit the hardest.

Uthmeier is right to draw that line. And this doesn’t have to be a partisan issue.

Whether you vote red, blue or not at all, the principle is the same: the government should not permanently strip constitutional rights from people who pose no danger to their communities. That’s not a left or right position. That’s an American one.

The Attorney General opened a door. Florida should walk through it.

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Danielle L. Campbell is Community Engagement Director for Protect Peace, a public education campaign of 2A Forward. Protect Peace is pro-Second Amendment and anti-violence.