Why federal courts are split on banning guns at the post office

David Nastri has held a Connecticut concealed-carry license for three decades. A military veteran turned lawyer, he wanted to be able to carry his handgun when he stopped at his local post office to mail a package, so he sued to challenge the federal ban that stopped him. In March, a federal judge in Connecticut told him no, the ban stands. Judges in Texas and Florida, ruling in separate cases brought by other plaintiffs, had already said the opposite.

Two overlapping bans, one statute and one regulation

Two federal rules combine to keep firearms out of post offices. The older and narrower is 18 U.S.C. § 930(a), added to federal law in 1988, which bars firearms in any “Federal facility,” defined as a building where federal employees regularly work, with an exception for carrying “incident to hunting or other lawful purposes.”

The second is a Postal Service regulation, 39 C.F.R. § 232.1(l), adopted in 1972, which separately bans firearms, explosives and other weapons anywhere on “postal property,” a term broad enough to reach parking lots, with only a narrower carve-out for official business. Because the two overlap but are not identical, plaintiffs challenging one have generally had to challenge both at once.

What Bruen changed about how judges decide on gun laws

Before 2022, courts evaluating gun laws typically balanced the government’s interest against the burden on gun owners, a flexible test that gave regulators considerable room. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen threw that approach out. Once a challenger shows the conduct in question, such as carrying a firearm, falls within the Second Amendment’s plain text, the government must instead show its restriction is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, typically by pointing to comparable laws from the Founding era or Reconstruction.

A modern law does not need an identical historical twin, the Court later clarified in United States v. Rahimi, but it needs a genuine analogue. Postal gun bans went essentially unchallenged for decades under the old test; under Bruen, the government has to prove something it had never previously been asked to prove.

Why a post office gun ban is a harder case than a school restriction

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Both Heller and Bruen listed schools and government buildings, alongside legislative assemblies, polling places and courthouses, as the kind of “sensitive places” where gun bans are presumptively lawful, and no one has seriously challenged that category since.

Legal historians who have studied those examples point to something they share: Founding-era governments actually posted armed marshals at courts, sergeants-at-arms in legislatures and armed men at polling places. An ordinary post office has none of that. There are no metal detectors, no guards, and any member of the public can walk in to buy a stamp.

Judge Vernon D. Oliver, who upheld the ban in Nastri’s case, argued the comparison to schools misses a different point: 18th-century “post offices” were usually just a room in the postmaster’s own home or a corner of a general store, not distinct government buildings at all, so their absence from Founding-era weapons laws proves nothing about how a modern, purpose-built post office should be treated. He grounded his ruling in a Second Circuit precedent finding a “well-established and representative tradition of regulating firearms in public forums and quintessentially crowded places” going back centuries.

Three rulings, two different answers

In January 2024, a federal judge in the Middle District of Florida dismissed a criminal charge against a postal worker caught carrying at work, ruling the statute unconstitutional as applied. The Justice Department chose not to appeal, leaving the decision to stand only within that district.

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In September 2025, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas went further in a civil case brought by the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation, ruling both the statute and the regulation unconstitutional as applied to those groups’ members and later extending the order to cover them nationwide. The government appealed to the Fifth Circuit, then withdrew that appeal in July 2026.

Then came Nastri’s case in March, when Judge Oliver reached the opposite conclusion. What gets called a “circuit split” is, for now, a split among district courts, made more unusual by the fact that the government has twice chosen not to defend the ban on appeal while still enforcing it everywhere Nastri’s case does not reach.

A resolution is still years away

The clearest sign of where the executive branch now stands came on August 12 when the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel told Attorney General Todd Blanche in a formal opinion that the statute’s exception already covers ordinary self-defense carry, reasoning that carrying a weapon into a building open to the public is “a paradigmatic ’lawful purpose’”. It added that the Postal Service’s broader regulation cannot be enforced against anyone the statute exempts.

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That opinion binds federal prosecutors’ charging decisions, but it is not a court ruling, does not erase the regulation from the books, and could be withdrawn by a future administration. That’s why gun-rights groups still consider the outstanding court injunctions the more durable protection. Nastri’s appeal to the Second Circuit is now the only one of the three cases on a path to an actual appellate ruling, and if that court upholds the ban while the other two rulings stand unreviewed, the mismatch would be close to the kind of clean conflict the Supreme Court typically waits for. Until then, whether a customer can legally carry a handgun into a small-town post office depends, as a practical matter, on which side of a district line that post office happens to sit.

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