DOJ Red Letter Decision
Don’t know if anyone has tried to ship a gun anywhere before – like flying with a gun, it has turned into a Byzantine process of selecting the correct shipper, how fast to ship, and trying not to get sideways with Federal and state laws.
Sometimes you pay more for the shipping company’s failures. If you order a gun to be shipped from a dealer to the local store – man, it arrives in a hurry! Well, that isn’t great customer service – that is UPS and Federal express MANDATING that overnight service be used. Why? I was around a few decades ago when they did this, and there was a one-word reason. Theft. Not by gangs knocking off the UPS truck and making off with 20 keys of gold (h/t to NRPS!) but they admitted that their internal anti-theft practices were so weak that they want firearms under their control as little time as possible. Too tempting for the lads sorting freight to know a gun might be there overnight. Oh, yeah, and you pay for the faster freight.
But the process may be getting a little LESS Byzantine. As y’all know, I often chide Pam Bondi for being a bit weak on the 2nd Amendment front – she has in the past supported anti-gun laws which no true 2A person does (similar to her boss – where’s that carry license reciprocity we were promised during the election?) BATFE is even defending the National Firearms Act of 1934 in court under her leadership, despite the Supreme Court upholding it not as a gun bill, but as a TAX – and the Big Beautiful Bill killed off the tax, so why do we still have the rest of the nonsense like the enhanced background checks, fingerprinting etc. for NFA items? BUT – for once DOJ is getting it right.
The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), led by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, issued a groundbreaking memorandum opinion Jan. 15, concluding that 18 U.S.C. § 1715, the nearly century-old federal statute prohibiting the mailing of concealable firearms, is unconstitutional as applied to constitutionally protected arms, such as handguns.
Enacted in 1927 as one of the earliest federal gun control measures, § 1715 declares “pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person” nonmailable, with limited exceptions for government officials and licensed dealers. The law was originally designed to curb mail-order handgun sales that bypassed strict state and local regulations during the early 20th century. Today, combined with policies from private carriers like FedEx, UPS, and DHL, which largely prohibit nonlicensed individuals from shipping firearms, it effectively creates a near-total ban on private citizens mailing handguns.
Thank the Supremes for the Bruen decision on this.
Most critically, the opinion deems § 1715’s purpose illegitimate: it aims to suppress traffic in concealable firearms, particularly handguns, which Congress in 1927 viewed as non-protected and primarily criminal tools.
This directly conflicts with post-Heller jurisprudence affirming handguns as quintessential self-defense weapons. No historical tradition broadly supports prohibiting the shipment of protected arms among law-abiding citizens. Colonial-era restrictions on selling arms to Native Americans or exporting during wartime are distinguishable, as they addressed hostile threats or common defense, not private interstate commerce. BFA
I would call this a “light at the end of the tunnel” sort of thing – I would NOT walk into your local USPS with a boxed up 1911 for mailing just yet…but the day is coming. The law is on the books, just not being enforced – let’s hope § 1715 can get repealed or modified. Soon.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Guns, Legal, None
The most important thing I see this doing is making it simpler for people to ship guns for service or gunsmith work. It would probably be beneficial for frequent travellers too. I travel through gun-friendly states between LA and VA, but if I had to visit, say, Vermont, amd especially if I flew, I’d probably be tempted to send a handgun in advance. Too many rapidly anti-gun states to pass through, like MD and NY, to risk having one in the car.
But FedEx screws things up a lot. We’d occasionally receive special order guns for the pawn shop down the road at Bass Pro. We’d have to acquire them and do an FFL transfer. Before I worked there, the Hooters next door supposedly received a box of Glocks. Their manager contacted Bass Pro real quick to get them to their proper place. I can just picture some methed up Coonass Hooters Girls rolling around with their “work bonus” Glock 19s. 😅
Back in that day (1920s) magazines and newspapers had a number of ads for cheap .22/.32/.38 revolvers and automatics in their back pages and classified sections. You could get a functioning .38 for about $10. In 1924 dollars this is about $188 or very nearly the same as a HiPoint Pistol costs today.
Having had to work around fed ex and ups to ship a basket case 1873 SAA to a restoration ‘smith, I applaud this change. The locals were really hard to deal with as they interpreted the rules any damn way they wanted in order to not ship a weapon.