The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a twenty-eight-page opinion on August 12 concluding that federal law permits ordinary Americans to carry firearms into post offices open to the public. Application of 18 U.S.C. § 930(a) to Post Offices, signed by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora C. Pettit and addressed to the Attorney General, is not a court ruling. It is something with a more immediate effect: binding legal advice that the executive branch follows.
What the Opinion Concludes
OLC occupies a peculiar and powerful place in the federal government. Its lawyers tell the President and the agencies what the Constitution and federal law permit, and those conclusions govern executive conduct until a court says otherwise. When OLC says a statute does not mean what the government has been claiming it means, enforcement stops.
The holding is stated on the opinion’s first page: section 930(d)(3) “permits the lawful carrying of constitutionally protected firearms in post offices that are generally open to the public.” The conclusion goes further, instructing that the executive branch may not enforce section 930(a) or the Postal Service’s own regulation, 39 C.F.R. § 232.1(l), against a law-abiding person carrying into a post office for self-defense.
The Exception Congress Wrote in 1988
Section 930(a) makes it a crime to possess a firearm in a federal facility. That much has been quoted at gun owners for decades. What has gone unquoted is subsection (d), which lists three exceptions. The first two cover law enforcement and the military. The third is ours:
the lawful carrying of firearms or other dangerous weapons in a Federal facility incident to hunting or other lawful purposes.
Everything turns on four words. Is carrying a handgun for self-defense a lawful purpose? I have been making that argument for years, and OLC has now put it in writing:
Because carrying arms for self-defense when entering a building held open to the public is a paradigmatic “lawful purpose[],” that exception permits the lawful carrying of constitutionally protected firearms in post offices.
Notice what the opinion declined to do. It acknowledged it would have significant constitutional concerns if Congress had imposed a blanket ban on carrying into a building the public has frequented since the founding — and then said it need not reach the question, because Congress had already written the exception. That is statutory interpretation doing the work of constitutional law, which is the more durable result. A holding that rests on the text of a statute does not depend on how the next Court composes itself.
Heller and Wolford Do the Work
This is what I mean when I say we build this right brick by brick, precedent by precedent. OLC grounded its reading in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), for the proposition that the inherent right of self-defense is central to the Second Amendment right, and then leaned on Wolford v. Lopez, 146 S. Ct. 2032 (2026), decided seven weeks earlier, for the observation that people who carry for self-defense visit ordinary public establishments in the course of a normal day — gas stations, grocery stores, barber shops, laundromats.
The opinion drew the obvious conclusion: a post office open to the public is a retail establishment of the same character, “requiring typically brief visits by law-abiding citizens to acquire everyday goods and services.”
Every victory becomes a tool for winning the next one. Heller made Wolford possible, and now both have been used to reopen the nation’s post offices to lawful carry without a single new case being filed.
What the Opinion Does Not Do
Precision matters more than celebration. The exception in subsection (d)(3) does not apply to federal court facilities, which section 930(e) governs separately and more strictly. Carrying into a federal courthouse remains a crime. The opinion also confines itself to post offices generally open to the public, and it does not address other federal buildings.
It is also worth being clear that judges have divided on the constitutional question. Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle held the ban unconstitutional in United States v. Ayala, and Chief Judge Reed O’Connor reached the same result in Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc. v. Bondi, while Judge Vernon Oliver upheld it in Nastri v. Bondi. The opinion acknowledges that disagreement. Its statutory route sidesteps it entirely.
Winning Away From the Courthouse
We do not only win the Second Amendment by prevailing in litigation. We win by keeping bad legislation from passing, by repealing what is already on the books, and by persuading the executive branch to read existing law correctly. The tax repeal that gutted the National Firearms Act’s registration scheme came from Congress, not a court. This opinion came from a memorandum, not a verdict.
Neither would have happened under a different administration. That is not a partisan observation. It is a description of how the executive power actually works, and a reason to pay attention to who holds it.
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.