Gun Owners of America and the Gun Owners Foundation have sued the United States Postal Service in the Western District of Pennsylvania, asking a federal court to declare that 18 U.S.C. § 1715 — a Prohibition-era law banning ordinary Americans from mailing handguns — violates the Second Amendment. The case, Shreve v. United States Postal Service, No. 3:25-cv-214, was filed on July 14, 2025, and it could not have come at a better time.
A 1927 Law That Has No Business Surviving Bruen
The statute at issue, 18 U.S.C. § 1715, has been on the books since roughly 1927. It bars ordinary citizens from using the U.S. Postal Service to ship or receive handguns — full stop. Long guns are fine. Unloaded rifles and shotguns move through the mail without issue. But a handgun — the “quintessential self-defense weapon” under District of Columbia v. Heller — is off-limits for everyday Americans.
Note the carve-outs baked into the statute: government workers can use the mails. FFLs can use the mails. But you and I, ordinary law-abiding Americans? We are, as I see it, the “peeons” of the postal system, denied a service that is freely available to those wearing a government badge.
That asymmetry is not just bad policy. It is unconstitutional.
The Plaintiff and Her Three-Hour Drive
The named plaintiff is Bonita Shreve, a Blair County, Pennsylvania resident and GOA member. She wants to mail a Bersa Thunder handgun to her father, who lives in Lebanon County — roughly a three-hour drive away. The transfer would be entirely legal under state law. She simply cannot complete it through the postal service, and private common carriers like UPS and FedEx refuse to ship handguns from private individuals as well. So she has nowhere to turn.
That is concrete, particularized injury — standing in its clearest form. And GOA is standing beside her.
Ancillary Rights and the Text of the Second Amendment
The GOA complaint makes an argument I find textually compelling. The Second Amendment protects the right “to keep and bear Arms.” “Keep” means to possess. You cannot keep a gun you cannot first acquire or receive. The right to acquire a firearm is a concomitant right embedded in the text — just as the Seventh Circuit held in Ezell v. City of Chicago, 651 F.3d 684 (7th Cir. 2011), that the right to train is an ancillary right implied in the Second Amendment because training is a necessary component of the core right. Same logic runs straight through here.
The USPS is unambiguously a federal government actor — it testifies before Congress on its budget and operates under federal authority. That makes its restriction on handgun shipping state action fully subject to Second Amendment scrutiny.
No Historical Tradition — Not in 1791, Not in 1868
Under the Bruen framework, the government must identify a historical tradition of analogous firearms regulation. Here, it cannot. The Post Office has been operational since 1775. Through the entire founding era and into the 19th century, there is no record of any restriction on mailing firearms — handguns included. The first such restriction does not appear until 1927, well into the 20th century.
The Supreme Court has made clear that the 20th century is simply too late to establish a historical tradition capable of cutting back rights confirmed by the Bill of Rights in 1791. And if you reach for the late-19th-century confirmatory analytic — the approach of checking whether 1868 practice bore out the original 1791 understanding — you still come up empty. No restrictions on mailing firearms anywhere near the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification either.
The government cannot manufacture a tradition out of whole cloth in 1927 and call it history.
Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, put the stakes plainly in a statement accompanying the filing:
“This complaint demonstrates that the federal government’s prohibition era ban on mailing handguns violates the Second Amendment. Gun Owners of America is proud to stand with its members and supporters to ensure that their constitutional rights are protected, and we are committed to ending all anti-gun rules for me, but not for thee, in any form they may take.”
What the DOJ Should Do — and What the Courts Will Face
My read is that the Department of Justice should look at this complaint and agree with the plaintiffs. Every prior court decision upholding § 1715 was issued under interest-balancing analysis — the two-step means-end scrutiny approach the Supreme Court explicitly buried in Bruen. Those decisions carry zero precedential weight under the current constitutional framework. They were decided under the wrong methodology.
If I were advising DOJ leadership, I would tell them to get in front of this now — reach down to the civil division attorneys handling the case in the Western District of Pennsylvania and make clear that defending a Prohibition-era gun ban under the Bruen test is not a fight the administration should pick. The case is filed in the Third Circuit’s jurisdiction, which is a reasonable venue, far better than facing the First Circuit in Boston or the Ninth Circuit in California.
This should be, as I see it, a straightforward win under the Bruen text-history-tradition framework. The history simply does not exist to justify this law. Not in 1791. Not in 1868. Nowhere until 1927 — and 1927 doesn’t count.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.