The United States Postal Service has a lot of problems. The length of time it takes to ship anything has been a joke my entire life. However, the Constitution says Congress has the power to create post offices and postal roads, which implies that we need a postal service, too. I can read it a little differently, but the USPS is here, and it's a thing. Until that changes, it is what it is.
But now they'll allow people to ship firearms. This is good news, because while common carriers like UPS or FedEx have always been options, they don't have quite the same system in place to protect goods. I mean, the USPS has its own federal agents. FedEx doesn't.
Now, though, it seems that Everytown's "newsroom," The Smoking Gun, is all upset over the rule change.
The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a new rule that would allow people to mail handguns for the first time since 1927. As discussed below, the proposed rule also goes a step further and rolls back restrictions on mailing rifles and shotguns. If it goes into effect as proposed, the USPS rule would open up a new gun trafficking channel for illicit markets and make it significantly easier for guns to fall into the wrong hands.
The move comes after the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a memorandum opinion in January declaring that a century-old federal law prohibiting people from mailing handguns and other concealable firearms through the USPS was unconstitutional and should no longer be enforced. The OLC also recommended that the USPS “modify its regulations to conform with this opinion.”
Now, let's keep in mind that something that's been around for nearly a century still doesn't count as far as the Bruen decision is concerned. It would have needed to be around for 250 years or so for it to matter, and it just ain't that old.
Still, this is just their framing of the story. This is where they start to talk about the new rule to set the stage for later.
And that's where they get really stupid.
Notably, the proposed rule also allows unlicensed individuals (non-FFLs) to mail handguns, rifles, and shotguns “to themselves or another person in another state for lawful activities” (emphasis added). The addition of “or another person” creates a new loophole, and the proposed rule does not place any restrictions on the recipients themselves or require that they undergo background checks, for example.
Oh, wow. Mic drop, right?
Hardly.
The USPS rules here say you can ship to another person for lawful activities, but USPS policy doesn't supersede federal law as to shipping guns out of state. It never has. If I shipped a gun directly to Cam in Virginia from my home in Georgia, I'm violating federal law by doing so.
What the rule change really does is make it less of a hassle to ship to a licensed dealer or a gunsmith with the required licensing and does so without the USPS getting up in your business about it. Legally, nothing changed with regard to who you're sending a gun to. It's just removing the USPS from the equation.
Oh, but the old system works, they tell me. Look at how good it worked.
This system has been effective. Of the 4,082 gun trafficking investigations identified by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) between 2017 and 2021 in which a method of transportation was known, 179 (or 4.4 percent) involved common carriers and 131 (3.2 percent) involved the U.S. mail.
So, we don't know that it worked worth a damn. Just under eight percent were cases where the method of transportation was known, and of those, just 1.2 percent fewer used the USPS.
Was that because of the system or because a lot of people just don't like to use the postal service for shipping stuff?
Most traffickers don't ship guns across the country. They drive them because they have control of their inventory. They have it with them, where they know exactly where it is. It's illicit goods, and they know it, and they want to make sure no one gets suspicious. They can't do that in a collection facility for some shipping company, so most don't use it.
But the difference between common carriers and the postal service is minuscule, especially when you're looking at the totality of guns over those five years.
In other words, as per usual, the Everytown bunch is freaking out not because there's a real threat to public safety, but that the systems of control they've long counted on are breaking down. Even if it changes nothing, it's still far too much for them, so they're going to act like the sky is falling, even if they have to twist things to make it look like they're right.
Par for the course, really.
