Three AGs Fight USPS Gun Shipping

Three state attorneys general are trying to keep you from mailing a firearm, stepping into a Pennsylvania lawsuit the federal government just stopped defending.

State of play: The DOJ under the Trump administration concluded the century-old federal ban on shipping guns through the USPS is likely unconstitutional and dropped its defense. That left a legal vacuum, and the AGs of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware filed a brief Monday asking the court to let them fill it.

Catch up quick:

• A 1927 law — written during Prohibition to slow mob gun shipments — bans using USPS to mail firearms
• Private carriers like UPS won't let non-FFLs ship guns either, leaving ordinary people with no legal shipping option at all
• Blair County, PA resident Bonita Shreve and Gun Owners of America sued the Postal Service last July over this exact problem
• Shreve needs to transfer a handgun to her father in Eastern Pennsylvania — a six-hour round trip she shouldn't have to make

The three AGs argue that allowing USPS gun shipments would "impair states from enforcing their own safety laws." What they don't explain is how a Pennsylvania woman mailing a handgun to her father undermines anything in Trenton.

"Those interests are no longer represented by the Federal Defendants, which no longer offers any defense of this critical public safety law on the merits." — AGs of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, Monday brief

Reality check: The law being defended here is older than the Korean War and was written to stop Al Capone, not your dad from receiving his own property. Non-FFLs already can't ship through UPS or FedEx. The practical result of the existing law isn't gun safety — it's that any transfer requiring shipment forces you to drag an FFL into paperwork they didn't need to do.

The legal question: The Supreme Court's Bruen framework asks whether a gun regulation has roots in historical tradition at the time of the Founding. A 1927 Prohibition-era statute written to combat organized crime doesn't have much of an argument there. These three AGs are likely buying time, not winning.

What to watch: Whether the Pennsylvania federal court grants the intervention motion. If it does, it extends the fight. If it doesn't, the current status — that you can now ship via USPS — may hold while the underlying case proceeds. Either way, this one is heading somewhere appellate courts will have to sort out.

The bottom line: A 99-year-old law written for bootleggers shouldn't be the reason a law-abiding gun owner can't mail her own firearm to her father. Three AGs disagree. The courts will have the last word.