{"id":112841,"date":"2025-10-24T13:06:47","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T18:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=112841"},"modified":"2025-10-24T13:06:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T18:06:47","slug":"112841","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=112841","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Litigation Highlight: Plaintiffs File Second Amendment Challenge to Federal Ban on Mailing Firearms<\/a><\/p>\n

In mid-July, two gun-rights groups and an individual plaintiff wishing to mail a handgun to her father filed suit in federal court in Pennsylvania alleging that the federal ban on mailing firearms through the U.S. Postal Service violates the Second Amendment.\u00a0\u00a0This federal restriction dates to 1927\u2014as the\u00a0complaint<\/a>\u00a0notes, it was the first federal gun control law[1]<\/a>\u00a0and pre-dates the National Firearms Act by almost a decade.\u00a0\u00a0The lawsuit, which is still in its early stages, implicates tricky questions surrounding legislative intent and how historical tests can account for technological innovation.<\/p>\n

Filed on July 14, the Pennsylvania case is captioned\u00a0Shreve v. United States Postal Service<\/em><\/i><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0The plaintiffs ask the court to strike down\u00a018 U.S.C. \u00a7 1715<\/a>, which provides that \u201c[p]istols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person are nonmailable and shall not be deposited in or carried by the mails or delivered by any officer or employee of the Postal Service.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The law contains exceptions for guns mailed in connection with military or law enforcement service and for \u201ccustomary trade shipments\u201d in which firearms are conveyed from manufacturers to dealers.\u00a0\u00a0The statute only applies to the United States Postal Service.\u00a0\u00a0Knowing violations of the ban constitute a federal crime.<\/p>\n

Shreve, a Pennsylvania citizen, would like to mail a handgun to her father as a gift and is permitted to do so under state law. The two organizational plaintiffs, Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners Foundation, each assert standing because \u201csome of the[ir] members . . .\u00a0\u00a0also wish to use the U.S. Postal Service to mail their lawfully owned handguns and other concealable weapons for private, lawful purpose.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The plaintiffs assert that they cannot use private courier services\u2014such as UPS or FedEx\u2014because \u201cprivate common carriers have prohibited the practice [of mailing guns] for several years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs in\u00a0Shreve<\/em><\/i>\u00a0argue that the conduct of mailing firearms is protected because, \u201cif the Second Amendment\u2019s plain text did not cover such ancillary acts as shipment or receipt, the government could ban these acts outright, crippling Americans\u2019 access to firearms.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0They emphasize that, while \u201cthe U.S. Postal Service traces its lineage to 1775, . . . at no point did the Founders ever criminalize the mailing of handguns as the challenged statute does now.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The complaint further argues that exceptions to the federal ban\u2014including for official weapons shipped by government agencies, commercial transactions, and long guns\u2014belie any purported public safety objective.\u00a0\u00a0Plaintiffs frame the 1927 statute largely as a response to \u201canti-gun media sensationalism\u201d that \u201cdid little \u2013 if anything \u2013 to curb violent crime.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Thus, the complaint concludes, the law \u201cis inconsistent with Founding-era historical tradition [and] violates the Second Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First, it\u2019s worth unpacking why this challenge to a 100-year-old law is being brought\u00a0now<\/em><\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0Bruen<\/em><\/i>\u00a0is, of course, a large part of the story\u2014the plaintiffs surely have a stronger argument that the restriction is inconsistent with history than they would under a means-end scrutiny approach that accounts for safety concerns with postal employees handling firearm shipments.<\/p>\n

However, another wrinkle is the fact that, while major private carriers like UPS and FedEx were once willing to ship at least some firearms for private customers, that is no longer the case. The 1927 law did not place any restrictions on firearm shipments through private couriers.\u00a0\u00a0And it appears that private companies did permit shipments until quite recently, at least in some form\u2014one report<\/a>\u00a0suggests that UPS stopped shipping guns for private individuals in 2022 and FedEx changed its policy in 2020.\u00a0\u00a0Both companies now generally limit firearm shipments to licensed dealers who have a pre-existing contractual relationship with the company.\u00a0\u00a0That change may have been legally significant, too.\u00a0\u00a0As a matter of standing, it\u2019s not clear that a plaintiff like Shreve would be able to allege a cognizable injury based on the inability to ship with USPS if other options were available (even at a slightly higher cost).<\/p>\n

Second, it\u2019s not immediately clear from the complaint why\u2014as the plaintiffs suggest\u2014the approach to mailing would or should be the same for handguns and long guns.\u00a0\u00a0The complaint suggests that it is \u201ccurious\u201d that Americans \u201cremain free to ship long guns like rifles and shotguns.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Yet states, and the federal government, frequently regulate handguns differently from long guns.\u00a0\u00a0For example, FFLs are permitted to sell long guns but not handguns to individuals under age 21.\u00a0\u00a0And this has been true for centuries.\u00a0\u00a0Much early state gun regulation focused specifically on small, easily concealable weapons such as pistols and knives but did not impact larger firearms like muskets or rifles.<\/p>\n

Third and finally, the push to overturn the mail order ban comes at an interesting time: as self-manufactured firearms proliferate and it becomes easier to order gun parts that can be assembled into a working firearm.\u00a0\u00a0As the Supreme Court\u00a0recently noted<\/a>, some build-it-yourself gun kits are \u201cso easy to assemble that . . . an individual who ha[s] never before encountered the kit [i]s able to produce a gun from it in 21 minutes using only \u2018common\u2019 tools and instructions found in publicly available YouTube videos.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Notably, the federal mailing ban in \u00a7 1715 does\u00a0not<\/em><\/i>\u00a0appear to apply to all \u201cfirearms\u201d under federal law, a term which ATF has construed to include many, if not all, gun assembly kits.\u00a0\u00a0Rather, \u00a7 1715 applies only to a listed set of guns: \u201cPistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Shreve purportedly wishes to mail a fully operable handgun to her father; but future debates will likely center around the propriety of mailing kits, 80% receivers, and associated parts that enable the recipient to create an unserialized, untraceable firearm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Litigation Highlight: Plaintiffs File Second Amendment Challenge to Federal Ban on Mailing Firearms In mid-July, two gun-rights groups and an individual plaintiff wishing to mail a handgun to her father filed suit in federal court in Pennsylvania alleging that the federal ban on mailing firearms through the U.S. Postal Service violates the Second Amendment.\u00a0\u00a0This federal … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,23,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-courts","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112841"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112842,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112841\/revisions\/112842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}