Florida law is silent regarding the manufacture, sale or transfer, transportation, licensing, or registration of machine guns and/or fully-automatic firearms. Florida prohibits any person from owning or having in his or her care, custody, possession, or control any machine gun which is, or may readily be made, operable. This prohibition does not apply to antique firearms or firearms that are lawfully owned and possessed under provisions of federal law.¹

Federal law requires machine guns to be registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF), and generally prohibits the transfer or possession of machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986.² In December 2018, ATF finalized a rule to include bump stocks within the definition of a machine gun subject to this federal law, meaning that bump stocks will be generally banned as of March 26, 2019.³

Florida prohibits the possession, sale, importation, transfer, and distribution, of bump-fire stocks, defined to mean “a conversion kit, a tool, an accessory, or a device used to alter the rate of fire of a firearm to mimic automatic weapon fire or which is used to increase the rate of fire to a faster rate than is possible for a person to fire such semiautomatic firearm unassisted by a kit, a tool, an accessory, or a device.”⁴

 See our Machine Guns policy summary for a comprehensive discussion of this issue. 

1. Fla. Stat. §§ 790.221(1) and (3). “Machine gun” is defined as “any firearm, as defined herein, which shoots, or is designed to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manually reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” Fla. Stat. § 790.001(9).[↩]
2. 18 U.S.C. § 922(o); 26 U.S.C. § 5861(d).[↩]
3. Bump-Stock-Type Devices, 83 Fed. Reg. 66,514 (Dec. 26, 2018) (to be codified at 27 C.F.R. pts. 447, 478, 479).[↩]
4. Fla. Stat. § 790.222.[↩]