On Thursday, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued an opinion indicating the ban against mailing handguns violates the Second Amendment.
The ban has been in place nearly 100 years.
In the opinion, the OLC pointed out:
In 1927, Congress declared ‘pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person’ to be nonmailable…(codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. § 1715). With some exceptions not relevant here, those who deposit any such firearm in, or cause any such firearm to be delivered by, the mail face criminal sanction.
OLC added:
Although this statute does not prohibit the shipment of concealable firearms by private companies, major express services currently forbid all persons from shipping firearms, except for some federal firearms licensees that have private shipping agreements.1 Thus, unlicensed private citizens face a complete ban on shipping concealable firearms, even though handguns are among the core “arms” protected by the Second Amendment.
After examining 18 U.S.C. § 1715, the OLC noted:
We conclude that the restriction imposed by section 1715 violates the Second Amendment. Section 1715 makes it difficult to travel with arms for lawful purposes, including self-defense, target shooting, and hunting. The statute also imposes significant barriers to shipping constitutionally protected firearms as articles of commerce, which interferes with citizens’ incidental rights to acquire and maintain arms. Indeed, the statute ultimately aims to suppress traffic in
constitutionally protected articles thus rendering the law per se unconstitutional as to those articles…
The OLC observed that the 1927 ban cannot survive the historicity test set forth by Bruen (2022): “…We are aware of no historical analogues that would satisfy the government’s burden of showing that this unprecedented restriction ‘is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.'”
The opinion concludes with these words: “Accordingly, the Executive Branch may not, consistent with the Constitution, enforce section 1715 with respect to constitutionally protected firearms, and the Postal Service should modify its regulations to conform with the scope of the Second Amendment as described in this opinion.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.