Election updates; bump stock ban (2024)

New updates come to Central Florida's elections ahead of November vote, and the Supreme Court struck down a bump stock ban.

State Senate candidates fight over residency issue

In Florida Senate District 15 there’s an ongoing feud between incumbent Democrat Geraldine Thompson and her primary challenger, former state Sen. Randolph Bracy.

Bracy accused Thompson of not living within her district, even threatening to file a lawsuit if she qualifies for re-election.

Thompson fired back, claiming Bracy doesn’t live in the district, either, citing a homestead exemption he has in Lake county.

The district is entirely within Orange county.

Now, Bracy’s own sister, state Rep. Lavon Bracy Davis, is throwing her support behind Thompson.

She made a statement on behalf of the Democratic members of Orange county’s legislative delegation.

But are either Thompson or Bracy eligible to even run in Senate district 15?

The lawsuit Bracy is threatening likely won’t go anywhere, because the Senate itself ultimately gets to decide whether its members meet residency requirements.

Glen Gilzean announces he won't run for Orange County elections supervisor in November

Supervisor of Elections in Orange County Glen Gilzean announced Friday he will not run for re-election.

Gilzean has already overseen a few high-profile elections as voters around the county turned out for the presidential preference primary in the spring. Plus, another election to replace former City Commissioner Regina Hill's District 5 seat.

During the primary, in which several local municipalities held charter amendment or other races, the elections office provided a livestream of the vote counting process.

"We’ve expanded the number of polling locations, taken an aggressive role in engaging a new generation of poll workers, implemented the first-ever live stream of the election process to increase transparency and voter confidence, and taken a hard look at how we reach voters to ensure there are no barriers between the public and their ability to lawfully vote," Gilzean said in a statement Friday.

He also discussed other projects his office is currently implementing.

"The programs our team put in place already, and the ones that are just beyond the horizon, will take some time to fully materialize, but I earnestly believe they will fundamentally transform this office into a model of election integrity — not just in Florida, but in our wonderful nation," he said.

Thecurrent candidate fieldfor the elections post includes Democrats Karen Castor Dentel, Wes Hodge, and Dan Helm, as well as Cyntha Harris (NPA) and Sunshine Grund.

Before Gilzean, the post was formerly held by Bill Cowles, who retired earlier this year. Gilzean will serve the rest of Cowles' term, which will last until Jan. 6, 2025.

Gilzean was previously administrator of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which was created to replace the Reedy Creek District that previously oversaw the lands around Disney's property in the area.

Cowles was in office for 34 years and oversaw the fifth-largest county elections office in the state of Florida through multiple recounts.

Supreme Court strikes down federal ban on bump stocks

The Supreme Court on Fridaystruck down a federal banon bump stocks — gun attachments thatallow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.

The ruling was 6-3 along the high court's ideological lines. The ban was put into place in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump's administration in the aftermath of the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas, when a gunman used firearms equipped with bump stocks to open fire at a country music festival, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds more.

But the high court sided withMichael Cargill, a Texas gun shop owner who argued that the ATF overstepped when it classified bump stocks as machine guns under a federal firearms law that dates back to the 1930s.

"Under the National Firearms Act of 1934, a 'machinegun' is 'any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger,'" Justice Clarence Thomas, the rankingconservative judge on the high court, wrote in the majority opinion.

"Nothing changes when a semiautomatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock," Thomas explained. "The firing cycle remains the same. Between every shot, the shooter must release pressure from the trigger and allow it to reset before reengaging the trigger for another shot. A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate “functions” of the trigger. The bump stock makes it easier for the shooter to move the firearm back toward his shoulder and thereby release pressure from the trigger and reset it. And, it helps the shooter press the trigger against his finger very quickly thereafter. A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does."

"We conclude that semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a 'machinegun' because it does not fire more than one shot 'by a single function of the trigger,'" he later added.

But in a scathing dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the ruling "hamstrings the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter" and could have "deadly consequences."

"When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck," Sotomayor wrote.

Friday's ruling is the latest instance of the conservative high court expanding gun rights. The Supreme Court in 2020 declined to take up an appeal to the bump stock ban, leaving the Trump-era regulation in place.

The Biden administration fought to keep the Trump administration's ban in place, arguing earlier this year that the bump stock ban fit the legal definition of a machine gun. The high court appeared torn during the oral arguments in February, but seemed to indicate that Congress should be the one to weigh in on the issue.

“Intuitively, I am entirely sympathetic to your argument,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, argued at the time. “I think the question is, why didn’t Congress pass that legislation to make this cover it more clearly?”

President Joe Biden's reelection campaign blamed Trump for tilting the court's ideological balance, leading to the decision.

"Weapons of war have no place on the streets of America, but Trump’s Supreme Court justices have decided the gun lobby is more important than the safety of our kids and our communities,"Biden-Harris Communications Director Michael Tyler said in a statement after the ruling. "If you care about the gun violence crisis in this country, there is only one candidate in this race with a proven record of successfully taking on the gun lobby and only one candidate who will ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. That's President Biden."

Trump's presidential campaign weighed in on the high court's decision by saying that the ruling "should be respected" and using it as an opportunity to attack Biden on the border, crime and the Second Amendment by claiming that the Democratic incumbent "wants to take that right (to bear arms) away from law-abiding Americans" — even though the bump stock ban was enacted under Trump, and the high court's ruling did not reference the Second Amendment, but rather centered around the ATF's authority to enact the restriction.

"President Trump has been and always will be a fierce defender of Americans' Second Amendment rights, and he is proud to be endorsed by the NRA," Trump campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavittsaid in a statement.

Gun safety advocates condemned the ruling and called for Congress to take action to address bump stocks.

"Weapons of war have no place on the streets of a civil society," Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement. "That is why Democrats and Republicans alike supported the federal government banning bump stocks after they were used to fire over 1,000 rounds into a crowded music festival in Las Vegas, killing 60 people in the deadliest mass shooting in American history.Unfortunately, today’s Supreme Court ruling strikes down this important, commonsense regulation on devices that convert semiautomatic rifles into weapons that can fire hundreds of bullets per minute."