When the Supreme Court in 2008 ruled that the Constitution protected an individual right to bear arms, it allowed reasonable restrictions such as “long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”
Does the court’s definition cover post offices? And even if the answer is yes, does it also cover postal parking lots?
We don’t think that a post office — let alone an adjoining parking lot — qualifies under the court’s standard as a “sensitive place” where guns may be comprehensively banned. So we’re glad a federal judge in Denver has allowed a lawsuit to go forward challenging the U.S. Postal Service’s ban on guns.
The case, which has national implications, involves an Avon couple, Debbie and Tab Bonidy. The Bonidys possess concealed-carry permits under Colorado law, regularly carry hand guns for self-defense and pick up their mail at a post office 10 miles from home.
Under post office rules, however, they can’t even drive into the parking lot with a gun in the car.
Nor could a hunter, for that matter, who had no intention of carrying his rifle or shotgun indoors.
According to the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents the Bonidys, federal statute “prohibits private possession of firearms in federal facilities, except those firearms carried ‘incident to hunting or other lawful purposes.’ ” These exceptions do not apply to federal courts, where a total ban on guns is enforced.
Since a courthouse obviously qualifies as one of those “sensitive places” the Supreme Court had in mind — a location where passions can and do run high— the gun ban is entirely understandable. But a post office? The typical patron spends a few minutes in a placid atmosphere in which harsh words are about as rare as a GOP presidential contender calling for a tax hike.
Sure, you may have to wait in line a little longer to post a package during the holiday season, but even this rarely provokes overt anger. It wasn’t violent customers, after all, whose notorious rampages in the 1980s and ’90s gave rise to the phrase “going postal,” but disgruntled workers and former workers. And those episodes left an unfortunate impression that postal workers are an especially volatile lot.
In fact, a commission headed by Joseph Califano in the late 1990s found that postal workers were only one-third as likely to be victims of workplace violence as the rest of the national workforce.
“The Postal Service’s total ban on firearms possession impairs the right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment because that right cannot be exercised when individuals are traveling to, from, or through postal property,” the Mountain States Legal Foundation contends.
We agree. And we wish the Bonidys success as their case proceeds.
