Amtrak, the federally funded national railroad that carries roughly 750,000 passengers a day on its Northeast Corridor alone, is quietly considering a major policy change: adding lockboxes to more than 1,500 trains per day so that American gun owners can bring their firearms aboard, regardless of whether a locked baggage car is available. The story broke through CBS News, citing anonymous sources familiar with the proposed plan. The Trump administration has been pressuring Amtrak to loosen restrictions for months. This is a real win, and I want to explain exactly why — and why it does not go far enough.
Amtrak Is a State Actor — The Constitution Already Applies
The anti-gun crowd is treating this as a private company voluntarily expanding firearms access. It is not. Amtrak is funded and supported by the federal government. That makes it a state agency for constitutional purposes, which means the Second Amendment is not optional for them. The Bill of Rights constrains the government, and a federally funded railroad that restricts your right to keep and bear arms is constrained by the same Constitution that binds Congress and the executive branch. This is not a close question.
The current Amtrak rule only permits guns on the small subset of long-distance trains with locked baggage cars — a couple dozen routes out of the 1,500 trains running every single day. The proposed lockbox policy would extend the option to virtually every train in the system. That is a meaningful expansion. But note: even the current restriction, applied to a government entity with no meaningful security apparatus, is constitutionally dubious. The Overton window is finally moving in our direction, but the underlying obligation was always there.
The Three-Part Test for a Lawful Gun-Free Zone
Here is where I lay it out plainly, and I’ve published on this in detail in my Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy article. Before any location can constitutionally qualify as a government-mandated gun-free zone — what the political class calls a “sensitive place,” which is really just a propaganda phrase for disarming law-abiding citizens — the government must satisfy at minimum three criteria.
First: limited entry points. The location must have only a handful of controlled access points. Second: metal detectors and active screening at every one of those entry points, so bad actors cannot simply walk in armed. Third: armed security — actual trained personnel with firearms, positioned to neutralize a threat if one appears despite the screening.
That is the standard. Not my preference, not a policy proposal — the minimum constitutional threshold. If you are going to take away my fundamental right to defend myself with a firearm, you need to replace it with something real. Otherwise you have created a kill zone. As Dr. John Lott’s research makes plain, gun-free zones without comprehensive security perversely attract the worst people by concentrating the disarmed in one place.
Amtrak satisfies exactly none of these three criteria. Trains have countless access points. Nobody is screening passengers for weapons. There is no armed security of any kind. The current policy is therefore constitutionally untenable on its face. Lockboxes are better than nothing. They are not a constitutional substitute.
CBS News’s Spin Falls Apart Under Constitutional Analysis
CBS News framed the story around the arrest of a man who allegedly traveled by Amtrak from Torrance, California to Washington, D.C. with a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol, allegedly intending to harm administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The implicit argument: look what happens when guns are on trains. The answer is that the alleged bad actor followed whatever rules he chose to follow, and no lockbox policy would have stopped him. That is precisely the point Cesare Beccaria made in 1764 in On Crimes and Punishments — a book Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both read carefully. Beccaria argued that prohibitions do not deter people who have already decided to commit violence. They only disarm those who comply, leaving law-abiding citizens defenseless against those who don’t.
We do not assess constitutional rights through the lens of misuse. The First Amendment does not shrink every time someone abuses free speech. The right to keep and bear arms does not contract every time someone commits a crime with a gun. We assess rights from the perspective of lawful use by law-abiding citizens. CBS News has it exactly backward.
Congress is also reportedly considering two bills to make assaulting a railroad worker a federal offense, parallel to protections already on the books for airline workers. Fine as far as it goes. But someone who has decided to board a train and commit mass violence is not going to be deterred by a statute. He has already committed to the worst crime imaginable. What actually deters mass violence in unscreened locations is the credible possibility that someone in the crowd is armed — a possibility that current Amtrak policy eliminates entirely.
Island Hopping Toward Full Restoration
My overall read on the Amtrak development is positive. This is exactly how you win a war fought incrementally — island by island, the way Allied forces moved across the Pacific toward Japan in World War II. We win one island, we fight to the next. Every battle won is the platform for the next fight.
We take Amtrak lockboxes today. We make the constitutional argument more explicitly tomorrow — trains have no limited entry points, no passenger screening, no armed security, therefore the government has no constitutional basis to disarm anyone aboard. A court gets that case eventually, and the argument is strong. The Overton window keeps expanding. Thirty years ago nobody seriously argued for carry on Amtrak. Today the railroad is quietly adding lockboxes under pressure from a Second Amendment-friendly administration. That is movement.
So yes, celebrate this announcement. Encourage it. Push Amtrak to implement it quickly. And then immediately push for the next step: the right to carry on a train for self-defense, just as the Constitution has always required.
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.