Florida Attorney General Uthmeier: 3-Day Gun Purchase Waiting Period 'Unconstitutional'
What the left has said
Inferred left“Florida AG Abandons Defense of Gun Waiting Period, Advocates Warn of Danger”
For gun-safety advocates, Uthmeier's decision to surrender the legal defense of Florida's three-day waiting period is exactly the kind of rollback they feared after the Supreme Court's Bruen ruling. Waiting periods have a documented record of reducing firearm suicides and impulsive violence, and Florida's law was among the tools public health researchers point to as genuinely life-saving. Left-leaning coverage frames this as a politically motivated attorney general choosing ideology over the safety of Floridians, using a contested Supreme Court precedent as cover to dismantle a popular, common-sense regulation. The Bruen standard, critics argue, applies an ahistorical litmus test that conveniently invalidates modern safety measures simply because 18th-century lawmakers didn't think to write them down. The settlement, in this framing, isn't a legal inevitability but a choice, one that prioritizes gun-rights absolutism over the communities most at risk.
What the right says
Right“Florida AG Secures Win for Second Amendment, Ditches Unconstitutional Gun Wait Law”
For gun-rights supporters, Uthmeier's move is a straightforward act of constitutional fidelity: a top law-enforcement official refusing to defend a law the Supreme Court's own framework has effectively invalidated. Breitbart and aligned outlets frame the settlement as a clean application of Bruen, which held that gun regulations must be rooted in the nation's historical tradition, and three-day waiting periods plainly aren't. In this telling, waiting period laws were always more about bureaucratic delay than genuine safety, burdening law-abiding citizens who have a constitutional right to timely access to a firearm for self-defense. Right-leaning coverage casts Uthmeier as a principled official willing to follow the law wherever it leads, rather than defend a regulation simply because it's been on the books. The settlement is presented as a model for other state AGs who have been slow to reckon with what Bruen actually requires of them.