DOJ: USPS Handgun Mail Ban Unconstitutional

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has declared the federal ban on mailing handguns unconstitutional, directing the Postal Service to rewrite its regulations accordingly.

State of play: For decades, 18 U.S.C. § 1715 made it a federal crime to mail concealable firearms—pistols, revolvers, handguns—through USPS. If you needed to ship a pistol, you were routing it through an FFL, paying transfer fees, and eating whatever timeline that dealer's schedule allowed. That workaround is now legally unjustified.

Driving the news: Gun Owners of America filed Shreve v. U.S. Postal Service in the Western District of Pennsylvania on July 14, 2025. Rather than litigate, DOJ's OLC issued a formal memorandum opinion concluding the statute cannot be constitutionally enforced against law-abiding citizens shipping handguns for lawful purposes—self-defense, target shooting, or hunting.

The legal question: OLC applied the Bruen historical tradition test and found nothing. No founding-era analog. No relevant historical tradition supporting a ban on shipping protected arms. The opinion goes further, concluding the statute was designed to suppress traffic in constitutionally protected firearms—an illegitimate government purpose by any reading of the Second Amendment.

"For too long, law-abiding gun owners have been forced to navigate expensive, burdensome workarounds involving federal firearms licensees, just to ship a handgun—even for perfectly lawful purposes." — Erich Pratt, Senior Vice President, Gun Owners of America

The opinion does three concrete things:

• Prohibits DOJ from criminally enforcing the statute against law-abiding citizens
• Directs USPS to modify its regulations to align with constitutional requirements
• Recommends the statute not be criminally enforced going forward

Yes, but: An OLC opinion is executive branch guidance, not a court ruling. Congress hasn't repealed the statute. A future administration could reverse course, and courts haven't weighed in directly. Until USPS formally rewrites its regulations—and until a federal court puts a stamp on this—treat the situation as developing, not settled.

What Idaho owners should know: Nothing changes at the counter today. USPS hasn't updated its regulations yet, and private carriers like UPS and FedEx have their own handgun shipping rules that remain in place and unaffected by this opinion. Watch for USPS regulatory updates before assuming you can drop a Glock in a Priority Mail box.

The bottom line: This is the Bruen framework doing exactly what it was designed to do—forcing the government to justify gun restrictions against actual history, and losing when it can't. The practical change at the post office hasn't happened yet, but the legal foundation for the old ban just got knocked out.