July 15 (Reuters) – A gun rights lobbying group is suing the U.S. Postal Service in a bid to overturn its nearly 100-year-old ban on mailing handguns, arguing that the law wasn’t contemplated when the country’s founders drafted the 2nd Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.

Gun Owners of America and the Gun Owners Foundation filed the lawsuit, opens new tab on Monday in federal court in Pennsylvania, seeking to bar enforcement of the law, which makes it a felony to mail pistols, revolvers and other firearms that can be concealed on a person. The lawsuit also seeks an order declaring the law violates the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms.

Pennsylvania resident Bonita Shreve sued along with the group, claiming the law is preventing her from mailing a handgun to her father in another part of the state.

The ban comes with a fine of up to $250,000, a prison sentence of up to two years, or both, according to the statute.

Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, said in a statement that the group is “committed to ending all anti-gun ‘rules for me, but not for thee,’ in any form they may take.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service said it is agency policy not to comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit is the latest to challenge a law regulating guns and gun ownership brought after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 that expanded gun rights.

In that case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the 6-3 conservative majority established a new test for assessing modern firearms laws, holding that modern gun restrictions were required to be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service said that although the service itself has existed since 1775, the nation’s founders did not contemplate a rule like the 1927 law banning the mailing of handguns. The law was enacted during a purported crime wave in the 1920s that some blamed on mail-order gun sales, according to the lawsuit.

A number of laws regulating guns have been successfully challenged in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. In January, the U.S. Appellate Court for the Fifth Circuit held that a U.S. government ban on federally licensed firearms dealers selling handguns to adults under the age of 21 is unconstitutional.

Last year, the same appellate court held that a federal law prohibiting users of illegal drugs from owning firearms was unconstitutional as applied to the case of a marijuana user.

The case is Shreve v. U.S. Postal Service, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, No. 3:25-cv-00214.

For Shreve: Gilbert Ambler of Ambler Law Offices; and Stephen Stamboulieh of Stamboulieh Law

For USPS: Not yet available

Originally published by Diana Novak Jones for Reuters. Read the full story ›