Federal Judge Rules That Prohibition On Firearms in United States Post Office Facilities Is Unconstitutional
Jose Nino
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On January 12, 2024 United States District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle issued a ruling where she declared that the ban against firearms in US Post Office facilities infringes the Constitution.
The case dealt with Emmanuel Ayala, a postal worker who had been slapped with an illegal possession of a firearm in a federal facility charge. The firearm in question was a Smith & Wesson 9mm Ayala that he stored in a fanny pack after acquiring his concealed carry permit.
Ayala based his case around the Supreme Court’s Bruen (2022) decision, which determined that New York’s proper cause requirement was unconstitutional and put forward guidelines for assessing the constitutionality of other gun control measures in future cases. According to the guidelines, for the gun control measures to be constitutional, they must show a visible precedent in the history of US gun control laws.
Ayala argued that the ban on firearms in a federal postal facility is “unconstitutional as applied to him because the historical record does not support a law banning firearms in post offices.”
Mizelle highlighted that the US government’s response to Ayala’s assertion was “that the Second Amendment allows it to punish the bearing of arms inside any government building.”
In this case the US government classified post offices as a “sensitive place,” asserting that such a designation means the government can “ban the carrying of firearms while not violating an individual’s Second Amendment rights and is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Mizelle ended up rejecting this claim, asserting:
[Bruen] requires the United States to present historical support for § 930(a)’s application to Ayala, which it fails to do. Post offices have existed since the founding, as have threats to the safety of postal workers and the public entering those locations. Yet the historical record yields no “distinctly similar historical regulation addressing” those safety problems by regulating firearms in post offices….Bruen deems this absence strong evidence of the statute’s unconstitutionality.
Mizelle sided with Ayala in his assertion that the law banning firearms in a federal postal facility was unconstitutional, proclaiming, “I dismiss the § 930(a) charge because it violates Ayala’s Second Amendment right to bear arms.”
Any federal facility that bans the right to keep and bear arms is clearly acting in an unconstitutional manner. Taxpayer-funded institutions should be treated as pro-Second Amendment zones if the US is faithful to its constitutional principles. There’s no other way of slicing it.
Hopefully, the Post Office and federal institutions are correctly punished for not abiding by the Constitution.
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