Appeals court sides with physicians on gun law

Most of ‘docs vs. glocks’ found to be unconstitutional.

TALLAHASSEE — Siding with a coalition of individual doctors and medical groups, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that major portions of a controversial Florida law restricting physicians and other health-care providers from asking patients about guns is unconstitutional.

The statute, dubbed the “docs vs. glocks” law, included a series of restrictions on doctors and health providers.

Fo r ex a mple, i t s o u g ht to prevent physicians from entering information about gun ownership into medical records if the physicians know the information is not “relevant” to patients’ medical care or safety or to the safety of other people.

Also, the 2011 law said doctors should refrain from asking about gun ownership by patients or family members unless the doctors believe in “good faith” that the information is relevant to medical care or safety. And the law sought to prevent doctors from discriminating against patients or “harassing” them because of owning firearms.

The plaintiffs in the case, including individual doctors, argued that the restrictions were a violation of their First Amendment rights. A federal district judge agreed with them and blocked the law from going into effect. A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the law in three separate rulings, but the ban keeping the law from going into effect remained in place.

Thursday’s 90-page decision — composed of two majority opinions authored by different judges, as well as a dissent — came from the full appellate court.

The court found that the record-keeping, inquiry and anti-harassment provisions of the law are unconstitutional, but upheld the portion of the law that bars doctors from discriminating against patients who have guns.

Lawyers for the state argued that the law did not violate the First Amendment.

“The act’s goals are not only substantiated; they are compelling,” the state argued. “The act shields patients who own firearms from purposely irrelevant record-keeping, questioning, discrimination, and harassment, and thereby furthers the state’s compelling interest in protecting citizens’ fundamental right to keep and bear arms for defense of self and state.”

But Jordan noted that lawmakers relied on six anecdotes as the basis for the “Firearms Owners’ Privacy Act,” or FOPA, and that the court’s analysis focused on the First Amendment, not gun rights.