For well over a year, any gun owner who lawfully carried into Jacksonville’s city hall had their name, birthday, and type of gun collected and kept in a logbook in blatant violation of Florida law, which forbids cities from establishing any kind of registry of gun owners.
The practice was flagged by a Jacksonville resident, but after an investigation State’s Attorney Melissa Nelson declined to file criminal charges after concluding that the list was not maintained in knowing or willful violation of state statute.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier says ignorance of the law cannot excuse the actions of the city employee who maintained the list, and he says he’s suing the city for $5 million over the practice.
We are taking the City of Jacksonville to court for knowingly and willfully keeping an illegal gun registry in violation of Florida law. pic.twitter.com/0WNJ38c0xZ
— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) May 12, 2026
Uthmeier doesn’t have the authority to prosecute anyone criminally, but he can launch a civil suit, and that’s exactly what he’s done. The lawsuit was filed in Duval County Circuit Court on Tuesday. Uthmeier took to X a short time later to make the announcement, declaring, “the Second Amendment is not a second-class right and we will use all power of this office to protect the rights of Floridians.”
The city had kept logbooks at the entrance to Jacksonville City Hall and the Yates Building that houses the tax collector and the property appraiser. Security guards at the entry to the buildings recorded information about people entering with guns from July 2023 to April 2025 when a resident lodged a complaint about it.
Uthmeier connected the logbooks to Mayor Donna Deegan’s tenure as mayor.
“In July 2023, after Mayor Deegan took office, Jacksonville city management approved and implemented a logbook — a gun registry that required security officers to screen visitors and record the visitor’s name, age, state-issued ID number, and the weapon type of anyone found to be carrying a firearm,” he said in his video.
The lawsuit, which does not name Deegan, says the policy for using the logbooks was created by a facility manager in the city’s public works department and a deputy chief administrative officer gave approval of it in July 2023.
The city contends that Deegan was in the dark about the registry, and that the “practice was immediately ended once it became known.”
That may not matter, at least from a legal perspective. The Florida law says municipalities can be forced to cough up the $5 million fine if any registry “was compiled or maintained with the knowledge or complicity” of management, without explicitly naming mayors or city managers.
According to Uthmeier’s complaint, registry came about after Mike Soto, the facilities manager for Jacksonville, learned about Florida’s then-new constitutional carry law, which kicked in on July 1, 2023. Soto wanted city hall security guards to start collecting the information of those who were lawfully carrying inside the building, though why he thought that was necessary has never been made clear.
Soto prepared a request dated July 3, 2023, for the city Office of General Counsel to give him a legal interpretation of the new state law for concealed weapons and he attached a copy of the proposed changes in the city’s security directives, the lawsuit says.
]Soto did not send the request for legal advice, however, after a higher-ranking administrator in the Public Works Department told him he wouldn’t get a response from city lawyers because the city was working on compliance with the law, the lawsuit says.
Soto also emailed a copy of his proposed changes to Charles Moreland, who was the city’s deputy chief administrative officer at the time and was Soto’s point of contact within city management, the lawsuit says.
According to Uthmeier, Moreland signed off on Soto’s proposed policy, with the exception of limiting the number of firearms that individuals could cary into the municipal building. If that’s true, then multiple levels of management “knowingly and willfully” put this registry in place. It doesn’t matter, frankly, if there was no ill intent. The registry and the information it contained could have been swiped or stolen and used for any number of nefarious purposes, including as a handy list for criminals looking to steal firearms.
The creation of this list was completely unnecessary, and it never should have been suggested or approved by city officials. Uthmeier’s lawsuit is good news for Florida gun owners, and it shows the Attorney General is serious about protecting the Second Amendment… and those who exercise their right to keep and bear arms.
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