NRA Challenges Gun Ban in US Postal Service Facilities

The National Rifle Association and others are challenging federal laws that prohibit possession of firearms inside post offices and carrying or storing firearms on property controlled by the US Postal Service.

The bans violate the Second Amendment in part because the government can’t justify that the legal restrictions have “distinctly similar analogues” rooted in the country’s founding era, the plaintiffs say, and the government will be unable “to prove that a post office is a ‘sensitive place’ where firearms carry may be banned.”

The NRA is joined by Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation, and three Pennsylvania residents in the suit, filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

The US Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’ociation v. Bruen made it clear there were “‘relatively few 18th- and 19th-century ‘sensitive places’” where weapons were altogether prohibited, the complaint says.

Those places included legislative assemblies, polling places, and courthouses, but post offices “fall far outside that tradition.” While carry prohibitions at such places were enacted to protect “‘government deliberation from violent interference,’” a post office does not constitute “‘a ‘center’ of government deliberations,’” the complaint says.

Congress “passed numerous laws regulating and protecting the mail, mail carriers, and post offices throughout the nineteenth century. But they punished criminals, not law-abiding gun owners, and thus they did not ban firearms at post offices or on publicly accessible associated property,” the complaint says. Guns were first banned from post offices in 1972, the complaint says.

They’re asking the court for a declaratory judgment that federal law is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment to the degree it prohibits possession or carrying of firearms in post offices and other USPS facilities, as well as a permanent injunction to stop enforcement of the laws.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Goldstein Law Partners LLC and Giaramita Law Offices PC represent the individual paintiffs. Giaramita and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action represent the NRA. Ambler Law Offices LLC represents Gun Owners of America and the Gun Owners Foundation.

The case is Hornbake v. Blanche, W.D. Pa., No. 3:26-cv-00979, complaint filed 5/26/26.