Two enforcement actions broke on the same day, and together they tell me the war against illegal gun registries has finally moved from rhetoric to courtroom. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued the City of Jacksonville under Fla. Stat. § 790.335 for maintaining what the state alleges is an illegal registry of privately owned firearms. At the same time, Gun Owners of America, under Senior Vice President Erich Pratt, is hammering the ATF for digitizing Form 4473 records pulled from out-of-business federally licensed dealers. Both fights run through the same constitutional and statutory wall, and that wall is older and taller than most people realize.
What Jacksonville Was Actually Doing
Beginning in July 2023, shortly after Mayor Donna Deegan took office, Jacksonville city management approved a building-security log book. Security officers were directed to record the name, age, state-issued ID number, and weapon type of any carry-permit holder entering a city building armed. That practice ran until April 2025, when a lawful carrier was denied entry for refusing to be logged. Florida law is clean on this point: § 790.335 forbids state agencies, local governments, and political subdivisions from knowingly keeping any list or registry of privately owned firearms or their owners. Uthmeier is seeking $5 million in statutory damages plus injunctive relief — and on this record, he should win. A log that records who is carrying what, by name and ID, in a government facility is exactly the kind of registry the statute was written to kill.
The Federal Wall: FOPA and NICS
Federal law is just as emphatic. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 wrote the no-registration command directly into the Gun Control Act at 18 U.S.C. § 926(a):
“The Attorney General may prescribe only such rules and regulations as are necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter… No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter … be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States … nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established.”
Congress doubled the lock when it built NICS. 34 U.S.C. § 40901(i) provides:
“No department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States may … use the system established under this section to establish any system for the registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions, except with respect to persons, prohibited by section 922(g) or (n) of title 18…”
That is the statutory backstop GOA is wielding against the ATF’s digitization of out-of-business 4473s. Scanning paper forms into a searchable electronic database that links names to guns is precisely the “system of registration” Congress forbade.
October 1941: Even at War, No Registry
This American allergy to gun lists is not new. On October 16, 1941 — seven weeks before Pearl Harbor — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Property Requisition Act, P.L. 77-274, 55 Stat. 742. Congress gave the President sweeping power to requisition private property for the war effort, then carved firearms out with surgical clarity:
“Nothing contained in this Act shall be construed— (1) to authorize the requisitioning or require the registration of any firearms possessed by any individual for his personal protection or sport … [or] (2) to impair or infringe in any manner the right of any individual to keep and bear arms…”
Pearl Harbor was weeks away. The Nazis controlled Europe. And Congress still refused to register or seize the private guns of Americans. That is how deep the principle runs.
Kavanaugh Saw It Coming in 2011
The constitutional case against registration was already laid out, in granular detail, by then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh in his solo dissent in Heller v. District of Columbia, 670 F.3d 1244 (D.C. Cir. 2011) — “Heller II.” He wrote:
“D.C.’s law requiring registration of all lawfully possessed guns in D.C. is not part of the tradition of gun regulation in the United States; it is the most stringent such law in the Nation; and it is significantly more onerous than traditional licensing requirements or record-keeping requirements imposed only on gun sellers. Registration requirements of the kind enacted by D.C. thus do not satisfy the Supreme Court’s history- and tradition-based test. … Because most of the Nation has never required—and even now does not require—registration of all lawfully possessed firearms, D.C.’s strict registration law is not ‘longstanding’ in the United States… But D.C.’s registration law violates the Second Amendment as construed by the Supreme Court.”
That is the text-history-tradition test that Bruen later vindicated, applied directly to firearms registration. A Jacksonville carry log fails it. A digitized ATF 4473 archive fails it.
Why the Founders Drew This Line
The reason for the wall is older than the Republic. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars marched from Boston not to collect taxes but to seize colonial arms at Concord and arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock at Lexington. The shot heard round the world was fired because the government came for the guns. Justice Joseph Story — nominated by President James Madison and still the youngest justice ever seated — later called the armed citizenry “the palladium of the liberties of a republic” in his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution. Stephen P. Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich (2013) documents what happens when that palladium falls and pre-existing registration lists land in the wrong hands.
Uthmeier in Jacksonville and GOA at the ATF are doing the same work on two fronts. The trend is our friend, and the wall is holding.
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.