Florida's firearms history doesn't get talked about nearly enough in contexts like this. Most people think of it as a Sunbelt vacation state, but the legislative fingerprints on your carry permit — wherever you live — probably trace back to Tallahassee.

Spain made a calculated diplomatic move in the early 1700s that would echo through Florida's history: offering freedom to enslaved people who escaped from British Carolina colonies and converted to Catholicism... Its residents formed an armed militia, trained and equipped by Spain to defend against British incursions. Those men carried muskets and fought -- effectively -- at the Battle of Bloody Mose in 1740, repelling a British siege force.

Fort Mose is one of those historical footnotes that deserves a lot more shelf space. An armed free Black militia defending a fortified settlement in 1740 — that's not a footnote, that's a serious chapter. The Spanish weren't arming these men out of principle either, they were doing it because armed settlers are useful, which is its own kind of pragmatic logic that still shows up in firearms policy debates today.

The Second Seminole War forced the U.S. military to adapt in ways that had lasting consequences. The dense subtropical terrain... rendered conventional European-style linear tactics useless. Soldiers shifted toward lighter arms loads, smaller unit actions, and intelligence-gathering.

If you've ever had a conversation about why lighter rifles matter in thick cover — and I've had that conversation at the cleaning table more than once — it has roots going back to cypress hammocks in the 1830s. The Army didn't figure out small-unit light infantry tactics in Vietnam. They were working on it in the Everglades forty years before the Civil War.

Marion Hammer, a Florida native who had been president of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida since 1978, successfully lobbied the Florida Legislature to pass the Florida Concealed Weapon Licensing Law -- a shall-issue statute that required the state to issue a concealed carry permit to any applicant who met objective criteria, removing the subjective discretion that local law enforcement had previously exercised.

This is the one that changed everything for carry in America. Before 1987, whether you could legally carry concealed often came down to whether the local sheriff liked you. One woman in Florida is the reason that most of us live in shall-issue or better states today. That's not an overstatement — the article says 30+ states followed the Florida model within about 15 years. Next time someone at the gun counter acts like carry rights were always this accessible, point them back to 1987.

For those who carry or have gone through the permit process in Idaho — how much did you actually know about where shall-issue came from before reading something like this, and did it change how you think about the constitutional carry debate we've had here?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team