The Trump administration, in its ceaseless quest to blanket the country with guns, has taken the innovative and exciting step of saying that the federal ban on mailing concealable guns is unconstitutional.
Yes, a 99-year-old law that prohibited people from sending pistols and revolvers through the mail has apparently been wrong all along.
The Department of Justice memorandum outlining this explains all of the sad and horrible things that happen if you can’t pack up a pistol and drop it at the post office.
Attorney General Pam Bondi says that “the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.”
What if you want to mail yourself a gun ahead of time so it’s at your travel destination when you arrive? What if you want to mail yourself a gun because you might be forced, horror of horrors, to drive through a state with laws that don’t let you just wander around with all your guns? What if you want to mail yourself a gun in case you have to travel on a Greyhound bus and they won’t let you come strapped?
This was inevitable after December’s announcement that the DOJ created a special Second Amendment Task Force because, per Attorney General Pam Bondi, “the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.”
It’s honestly unclear if there’s any other constitutional amendment given such deference as that one, particularly in this administration. But now, thanks to Bondi, you have the constitutionally guaranteed right to not have to drive all the way to a store to get a gun.
So while you can now get a handgun in the mail anywhere in the country regardless of your state’s gun laws, if you live in a state that bans abortion, you cannot get abortion pills through the mail. And if an out-of-state doctor mails them to you? Well, that doctor faces criminal charges in absentia by a red state, which then demands extradition.
That’s exactly what’s happening right now in Louisiana.
Liz Murrill, the state’s rabidly anti-choice attorney general, has indicted California doctor Remy Coeytaux for allegedly mailing abortion pills to someone in Louisiana, where abortion is almost entirely banned.
The move garnered a nearly immediate lol nope from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said that he was “declining this extradition request from another state that seeks to prosecute a person for providing, receiving, or assisting with reproductive health care that is legal in California.”
But unfortunately, this isn’t the first instance of this happening.
Abortion-rights activists protest outside of the Supreme Court in 2024.
Texas’ equally rabidly anti-choice Attorney General Ken Paxton went after a New York doctor earlier this year, filing a civil lawsuit against Margaret Daley Carpenter for allegedly mailing abortion pills.
When Carpenter didn’t show up for the hearing, which is actually the totally correct thing to do when a state that has no jurisdiction over you tries to sue you, Paxton got a Texas court to issue a default judgment for $113,000.
Paxton then tried to get New York’s Ulster County clerk to file the judgment there so Texas could collect the payment. That also garnered not one but two lol nopes from the county clerk, and a New York judge later tossed out Paxton’s lawsuit trying to enforce the judgment.
Just as much as the DOJ is now stuffed with gun nuts, it’s now also stuffed with rabid anti-abortion types who are poised to try to enforce the 153-year-old Comstock Act, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials.
Comstock is a zombie law, one that’s still on the books but is no longer enforced, but the law’s definition of “obscene” includes both birth control and abortion pills. And now, if the Project 2025 zealots who now run the country get their way, Comstock enforcement will be back, baby.
This would mean that abortion pills could not be mailed anywhere—even in states where it is legal. It’s functionally a backdoor nationwide abortion ban, but since we no longer have a constitutional right to abortion, it may very well happen soon.
But, hey, at least you’ll be able to mail all the pistols your heart desires.
