The Department of Justice has voluntarily dismissed its Fifth Circuit appeal in Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc. v. Blanche, No. 25-11328 (5th Cir.), and the consequence is immediate and enormous. The nationwide injunction allowing members of the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) to carry firearms in ordinary post offices is now final, permanent, and beyond challenge. When the government withdraws its own appeal, the judgment below stands as settled law. Chief Judge Reed O’Connor’s ruling in the Northern District of Texas, No. 4:24-cv-00565, has prevailed. There is no longer anyone left to fight it.
From a Merits Win to a Final Judgment
This victory arrived in stages. On September 30, 2025, Chief Judge O’Connor entered final judgment holding that the federal ban on carrying firearms in ordinary postal facilities — 18 U.S.C. § 930(a) and 39 C.F.R. § 232.1(l) — is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment as applied to FPC and SAF and their members. There is no security screening at a neighborhood post office, nothing resembling the controlled entry that might make a building a genuine “sensitive place,” and no historical tradition that would justify disarming law-abiding citizens who walk in to buy stamps.
The second stage was the remedy. The DOJ moved to limit the injunction to members enrolled when the suit was filed, stripping out everyone who joined afterward, and on March 17, 2026, Judge O’Connor rejected that effort, confirming the injunction reaches “all present and future members” of both organizations, nationwide. The government then appealed to the Fifth Circuit. That appeal is what has now been abandoned:
“Pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 42(b), the defendant-appellant United States hereby moves to voluntarily dismiss this appeal, with each party to bear its own costs. Counsel for plaintiffs-appellees has indicated that plaintiffs-appellees do not oppose this motion.”
An unopposed Rule 42(b) motion is a formality the court will grant. The merits ruling and the full-scope remedy are now locked in.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
I have spent a great deal of time on this channel criticizing the DOJ when it has defended bad law. Consistency requires that I be equally direct when it does the right thing, and dropping this appeal was the right thing. Credit belongs to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division, and to Barry Arrington, who leads the Division’s newly created Second Amendment Section. A decision to abandon the appeal of a ruling that struck down a federal statute is not made casually; it reflects a deliberate judgment that this win should stand.
Let me state the larger point plainly: elections have consequences. A Democratic administration would not have surrendered this appeal, and no one should pretend otherwise. You can disagree with an ally’s past decisions and still thank that ally when it acts correctly. A one-way ratchet of perpetual grievance is not principle. It is bad strategy, and it discourages the very people whose cooperation the movement needs.
Why the Government Was Fighting the Remedy
The DOJ’s earlier resistance to the breadth of this injunction was never hostility to the Second Amendment. American law is a single connected web, and a ruling in one corner of it can be pulled taut in another. The administration has been fighting nationwide injunctions on a separate front — immigration, above all, where a lone district judge can bind the executive across the entire country. To stay consistent in that structural battle, the DOJ took an aggressive posture on the scope of remedies everywhere, and Second Amendment plaintiffs became collateral damage in a fight that was not really about guns at all.
By dismissing this appeal, the government chose to let our win stand rather than sacrifice it to that broader caution about remedies. That is the correct resolution. If the executive wants to argue for narrower injunctions as a general rule, it should make that argument uniformly — not by clawing back the constitutional victories its own supporters fought to secure.
The Same Lawyers, the Next Fights
The attorneys who carried this case deserve recognition of their own. Cooper & Kirk — David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson, and William Bergstrom — represented FPC and SAF here, and they are the same lawyers who secured Supreme Court review in the two pending “assault weapons” cases, Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, out of the Second Circuit, and Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, out of the Seventh Circuit, both granted certiorari on June 30, 2026 and expected to be argued this fall. That is a formidable winning streak, and it is about to be tested on the biggest question in this area of law.
My prediction is that the Court will hold what the Constitution already requires: that the AR-15 and other commonly owned semiautomatic rifles are protected arms. For today, the lesson is narrower and just as real. A right without a remedy is no right at all, and in the post office fight, we now have both.
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.