Fantastic! What could possibly go wrong when the people who can’t figure out “fragile” stickers start handling loaded — sorry, unloaded — Glocks?
Okay, in all fairness, this is actually a very good development. The backstory is hilarious and perfectly illustrates how our government works — which is to say, badly and based on laws older than your great-grandmother.
Since 1927, federal law has made it a felony to mail a handgun through USPS. You can mail a rifle. You can mail a shotgun. But a pistol? That’ll cost you up to $250,000 in fines and two years in the slammer. Congress passed this gem during Prohibition because gangsters kept mailing pistols to each other — reportedly 5,000 guns shipped to Detroit alone in 1924. Because apparently Al Capone’s crew loved stamps.
The whole thing unraveled thanks to a woman named Bonita Shreve from Blair County, Pennsylvania. Bonita wanted to mail a handgun to her father in eastern PA. She doesn’t hold a Federal Firearms License, so UPS won’t touch it. FedEx won’t touch it. And USPS said it was a federal crime. Her only legal option was a three-hour drive each way to hand-deliver the thing.
Bonita teamed up with Gun Owners of America and sued. Some lawyer at Trump’s DOJ took one look at the 1927 law and concluded what anyone with a functioning brain already knew — it’s unconstitutional. The opinion boiled down to: “Handguns are protected by the Second Amendment. The government runs a parcel service. You can’t refuse to ship constitutionally protected firearms to law-abiding citizens. End of discussion.”
GOA’s senior vice president Erich Pratt put it pretty diplomatically: “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.”
He’s being polite about it. What Pratt means is that Democrats rigged the system so exercising your Second Amendment rights requires a law degree, a three-hour road trip, and the patience of a saint. Bonita Shreve couldn’t mail a pistol to her own father without risking a felony — and every Democrat in Washington thought that arrangement was just peachy. That’s not “common sense gun safety.” That’s harassment with a government seal on it.
Meanwhile, the same era that gave us this ridiculous gun-mailing ban also gave us alcohol prohibition — which Congress had the good sense to repeal. The firearms restriction? That one stuck around for 98 years because Democrats will pry a gun regulation out of the federal code when you pry it from their cold, dead hands. (See what we did there?)
Now the USPS has proposed amending its rules so handguns get the same treatment as long guns — unloaded, securely packaged, tracked, signature required, compliant with all federal and state laws. Perfectly reasonable. Boring, even.
But are Democrats handling this like adults? You already know the answer. Attorneys General from New Jersey, Delaware, and New York — Jennifer Davenport, Kathy Jennings, and the eternally litigious Letitia James — rushed to court demanding to intervene. They claim that letting citizens mail firearms would “impair states from enforcing their own safety laws.”
Translation: “We don’t trust our peasants with constitutional rights and we’d like the federal government to keep punishing them on our behalf, thank you very much.”
This is the same crew that lets actual criminals walk out of courthouses with ankle monitors and a sandwich. Letitia James spent four years trying to bankrupt Donald Trump over a real estate valuation dispute where nobody lost a dime, but a grandmother in Pennsylvania mailing a gun to her dad? That’s the real threat to public “safety.” These people have their priorities so backward they need a chiropractor.
The timing of the USPS announcement deserves a chef’s kiss, by the way. They published the proposed rule on April 2nd — one day after April Fools’. Gun forum users couldn’t even tell if it was real. “That’s the best April Fools’ joke I’ve seen yet!” one guy posted. Another shared a story about USPS accidentally handing him a firearm that was supposed to go to a licensed dealer because the postal worker couldn’t read the shipping label correctly.
(And these are the people we’re trusting with handgun logistics. God bless America.)
Congress is backing the play too. A bill called the “Protecting the Mailing of Firearms Act” already has over twenty co-sponsors in the House. If the proposed USPS rule doesn’t finish the job, legislation will.
The public comment period runs through May 4th. Democrats will flood it with their usual “rivers of blood in the streets” hysteria. Republicans will point out that we’ve been mailing rifles and shotguns since forever and somehow civilization survived.
Bonita Shreve just wanted to send her dad a handgun without driving six hours round trip. Thanks to her — and a DOJ that can actually read the Constitution — millions of law-abiding Americans might finally get to exercise a right that a Prohibition-era Congress stole from them nearly a century ago. The only question left is whether USPS will deliver the guns to the right address or leave them on some random porch in Albuquerque.
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