Big news out of Tallahassee. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier just filed a notice in Morgan v. State of Florida, Case No. 1D2025-0377, before the First District Court of Appeal — and the filing is exactly the kind of incremental, brick-by-brick Second Amendment victory I’ve been talking about for years. His office reversed its own prior position, conceding that the felon-in-possession conviction of Christopher Morgan violated the Second Amendment as applied to him. That is a state attorney general walking into his own case and saying: we got this wrong.
The Facts of Morgan — and Why They Matter
The background is straightforward. In 2007, Christopher Morgan was convicted in Pennsylvania of carrying a firearm without a license under 18 Pa. C.S. § 6106, a third-degree felony. That was his only criminal conviction. Fifteen years later, in 2022, Morgan was pulled over in Florida and voluntarily disclosed to the officer that he had a handgun in his center console.
Florida charged him under Fla. Stat. § 790.23 — the state’s felon-in-possession statute — which tracks the federal language of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). Morgan pled no contest, received two days in jail and court costs, and appealed. His lawyers argued that because his underlying conviction carried no element of violence or physical danger, the categorical disarmament under Florida law was unconstitutional as applied to him. The state initially defended the conviction. Then Uthmeier’s office took a harder look.
What the AG’s Brief Actually Says
The filing is worth quoting directly. Uthmeier’s office wrote:
“On further reflection, the Attorney General is of the view that the conviction violated Morgan’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Properly understood, the Second Amendment permits the government to dispossess felons whose convictions indicate that the felon is dangerous, but not merely all felons as a categorical matter.”
That is a clean, correct statement of the post-Bruen standard. Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), once a law implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment, the burden shifts to the government to produce historical analogues supporting the modern restriction. “Right to keep” means the right to possess. “Right to bear” means the right to carry. Both are implicated when the state says you cannot have a gun in your car. The categorical felon-in-possession rule has to survive that historical inquiry — and as applied to a man whose only prior offense was carrying without a license in another state nearly two decades ago, it cannot.
Rahimi Cuts Both Ways
A lot of commentators treated United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024), as a disaster for the Second Amendment. I pushed back on that at the time, and Morgan is why I was right to push back. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for an 8–1 Court, upheld 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8) as applied to Zackey Rahimi — a man who had admitted to grabbing his girlfriend’s head, slamming it into his car dashboard, and then firing at witnesses who saw him do it. He was adjudicated a dangerous person in a civil proceeding with due process, and the Court said that history supports temporary disarmament of people found by a court to be a violent danger to others.
That holding is narrow in the right way. Rahimi does not say every felon can be disarmed forever. It says a person adjudicated as a violent danger can be disarmed. Christopher Morgan has never been adjudicated anything of the sort. There is no finding, no hearing, no judicial determination that he poses a physical danger to anyone. He disclosed his gun voluntarily to a police officer during a traffic stop. That is the profile of a responsible gun owner, not a Zackey Rahimi.
My one refinement to the AG’s brief: I would have added the word physical before “dangerous.” The word “dangerous” standing alone gives too much room to people who want to argue that anyone politically inconvenient is “dangerous.” The founding-era standard — and the standard Rahimi points toward — is physical, violent danger. John Adams made the point clearly at the Boston Massacre trial in 1770: colonists peaceably carrying arms for defensive purposes were entirely within their rights. It was the offensive, violent use of those arms that crossed the line. That is the line the Second Amendment has always drawn.
The Overton Window Keeps Moving
I want to zoom out for a moment because this filing matters beyond the Morgan case itself. When I was growing up, Vermont was the only state with permitless carry. Today, 29 states have permitless carry and all 50 have shall-issue permitting, thanks to Bruen. That shift did not happen in one Supreme Court case. It happened one win at a time — a legislative change here, a favorable circuit ruling there, a state AG taking a principled stand in an intermediate appellate court.
This is exactly that kind of moment. A state attorney general — Uthmeier, sworn in as Florida’s 39th AG in February 2025 — looked at a conviction his office previously defended, concluded it was constitutionally indefensible under the post-Bruen, post-Rahimi framework, and said so in writing before oral argument. That takes intellectual honesty and some courage. It also creates persuasive authority for every future as-applied challenge to categorical felon-in-possession statutes filed anywhere in the country.
The Second Amendment community should not want genuinely violent people armed. The whole point is that once a court finds someone to be a physical danger, with due process, disarmament is permissible. But Christopher Morgan is not that person. Florida just acknowledged it. That is a brick in the wall.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.