GOA Celebrates Win in Challenge to USPS Gun Shipping Rules

When people travel for a training class, they often drive. Transporting guns then is relatively easy, all things considered, though there are some things folks should be aware of.

Others fly, and they transport their guns via their flight, but that’s kind of a pain in the butt, too.

But what about when your gun needs to go to the other side of the country, but you don’t? With anything else, you just ship it. You put it in a box, weigh it, and find the cheapest acceptable shipping option. While my experience tends to put the USPS at the bottom of that list, it’s often other people’s choice for whatever reason, and since it’s taxpayer-funded, there’s really no reason they shouldn’t be a valid option for shipping anything that doesn’t require special handling.

The problem is that they won’t let you ship guns. You can’t send them to a gunsmith halfway across the nation with the service that your tax dollars help support.

Well…you couldn’t.

Now, you can, and Gun Owners of America are celebrating a massive win in that, in a press release sent on Thursday:

Today, Gun Owners of America (GOA) and Gun Owners Foundation (GOF) hailed a landmark opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declaring that 18 U.S.C. § 1715—the federal statute prohibiting the mailing of concealable firearms such as pistols, revolvers, and other handguns—is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment as applied to Second Amendment protected arms. This opinion was issued after GOA filed suit in Shreve v. U.S. Postal Serv., No. 3:25-cv-214 (W.D. Pa. July 14, 2025) on behalf of its members, seeking to have this exact ban declared unconstitutional.  

In its memorandum opinion for the Attorney General, the OLC concluded that the U.S. Department of Justice may not enforce the statute against law-abiding citizens seeking to ship or receive handguns used for lawful purposes, including self-defense, target shooting, and hunting. The opinion directs the Postal Service to modify its regulations accordingly to align with the Constitution. And it recommends that the statute not be criminally enforced.  

This is a major victory for Second Amendment rights. The opinion applied a historical analysis under the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller, McDonald v. Chicago, and especially New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, finding no relevant historical tradition justifying a ban on shipping protected arms. OLC also concluded that the statute was designed to serve an illegitimate purpose: suppressing traffic in constitutionally protected firearms. 

Erich Pratt, Senior Vice President of Gun Owners of America, issued the following statement:

“This opinion is a direct rebuke to decades of federal overreach that has unlawfully restricted Americans’ ability to acquire, maintain, and transport their firearms. 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. The DOJ now recognizes what we’ve always known: the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, and that includes the rights to acquire and transport them.”

 
John Velleco, Executive Vice President of Gun Owners Foundation, issued the following statement: 

“When the government enforces a prohibition on guns and gun owners with no historical foundation and no constitutional support—like the USPS ban on mailing handguns at issue in our case—it is acting outside the law. This historic move by the Department of Justice acknowledges that the Second Amendment protects the real, practical exercise of a fundamental right to acquire and transport a firearm. Neither Congress nor federal agencies are allowed to rewrite the Constitution to suit their anti-Second Amendment preferences.” 

This is, in fact, a significant win, especially as Cam pointed out in his coverage of the opinion on Thursday, the DOJ has seemingly been interested in defending all federal restrictions while going after state-level gun laws. To take this simple step is an important win.

And why shouldn’t it be? The fact is that gun ownership is constitutionally protected. The USPS is federally supported via tax dollars–it hasn’t funded itself in ages–so it shouldn’t be able to discriminate against goods that are perfectly legal to own and transport and aren’t dangerous to ship. I get them not wanting to ship nitroglycerin or anything, but an unloaded firearm properly packed in a box isn’t going to just “go off.”

Well, OK, the P320 might, but most guns won’t. It just doesn’t happen.

The regulation used to bar the shipping of firearms through the postal service was nothing more than yet another effort to establish the right to keep and bear arms as a second-class right. It wasn’t about safety because no one was unsafe. It was about making sure people thought of guns as inherently dangerous, even when not misused.

Now, companies and individuals who want to ship firearms have another option for doing so. Competition is good for everyone, and now there’s a bit more for sending guns from state to state, including for those who might want to ship a gun to where their training will be held, just so they don’t have to fool with flying with it.

Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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