Sara-James Ranta/Fresh Take Florida

The man at the center of a landmark court decision allowing people in Florida to openly carry guns – officially starting Thursday — is watching the consequences of his legal fight from inside a jail cell in Florida's Panhandle.Despite the appeals court's dramatic expansion of gun rights in the Sunshine State, the defendant in the case won't be allowed to possess a gun even once he's released. In an exclusive interview from the Escambia County Jail – convicted months ago in an unrelated, misdemeanor domestic violence case — Stanley Victor McDaniels, 42, called himself a patriot and indicated he has no regrets.

People with guns can begin carrying them openly on streets and inside businesses or restaurants where owners don’t object, from the Florida Keys to the Panhandle, the attorney general says.Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier clarified Monday the ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeals in Tallahassee – whose jurisdiction runs from Gainesville through the Panhandle. Uthmeier said the court’s ruling was effective “now,” but his spokesman said there was a 15-day window to exhaust an opportunity for an appeal that will never happen.

In a landmark decision, a Florida appeals court on Wednesday threw out as unconstitutional Florida’s law against openly carrying a gun in public, a decades-old statute that had made Florida one of only a handful of such states that banned gun owners from carrying a pistol on their hip or slinging a rifle over their shoulder in public.The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel for the 1st District Court of Appeals concluded that the 2nd Amendment and what it called the nation’s “historical tradition of gun regulation” made Florida’s gun law unconstitutional. The court’s jurisdiction stretches from the college town of Gainesville through the Panhandle.

Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, interviewed neighbors of the new immigration detention center in North Florida called the Detention Depot last week.