A nearly 100-year-old federal ban on mailing handguns through the U.S. Postal Service is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced, according to an opinion released Thursday by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The 15-page opinion concluded that a 1927 law, which made it illegal to use the Postal Service to mail concealable firearms, such as pistols and revolvers, infringes on the Second Amendment.
“Section 1715 makes it difficult to travel with arms for lawful purposes, including self-defense, target shooting, and hunting,” wrote T. Elliot Gaiser, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.
“The statute also imposes significant barriers to shipping constitutionally protected firearms as articles of commerce, which interferes with citizens’ incidental rights to acquire and maintain arms,” the opinion continued.
The law has, as is usual, a nasty racist history. The Mailing of Firearms Act which prohibits use of the U.S. Post Office for shipping concealable firearms, now 18 USC 1715, was debated in Congresses before its passage in 1927. A sponsor of that bill in 1925 was Senator Shields (D-TN) who explained the need for this law as the high murder rate in Memphis, Tennessee:
Prohibiting mail order shipping of handguns was supposed to make it easier to enforce state laws regulating handgun ownership—of which the focus was apparently blacks.Fifty-three negroes killed by negroes. Only seven negroes killed [by] whites. Only two whites killed by negroes--one a white burglar and the other assassinated by negro bandits....
Here we have laid bare the principal cause for the high murder rate in Memphis--the carrying by colored people of a concealed deadly weapon, most often a pistol. Can we not cope with this situation?[1]
[1] 65 Congressional Record 3946. The bracketed “by” appears to have been left
out of the transcript.
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