OSD 256: Going postal
A right's transition from being a mere parchment barrier to actually being treated as a right.
Have you ever gone back to visit your elementary school? You’ll have two takeaways from the experience:
Everything seems smaller than you remember it.
The rules and practices of this place once felt untouchable to you, like law handed down from on high to run your life. Now they seem like the cute practices of a distant tribe — weighty and serious to the tribe, but powerless to touch you.
A federal judge in Florida on Friday ruled that a U.S. law that bars people from possessing firearms in post offices is unconstitutional, citing a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 2022 that expanded gun rights.
…
[Emmanuel] Ayala, a U.S. Postal Service truck driver in Tampa, had a concealed weapons permit and kept a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun in a fanny pack for self-defense, his lawyers said.
He was indicted after prosecutors said he brought the gun onto Postal Service property in 2012 and fled federal agents who tried to detain him.
He was charged under a statute that broadly prohibits possessing a firearm in a federal facility, including a post office.
[Judge] Mizelle said that while post offices have existed since the nation's founding, federal law did not bar guns in government buildings until 1964 and post offices until 1972. No historical practice dating back to the 1700s justified the ban, she said.
Mizelle said allowing the federal government to restrict visitors from bringing guns into government facilities as a condition of admittance would allow it to “abridge the right to bear arms by regulating it into practical non-existence”.
That’s what it looks like to take a right seriously. When you were in second grade you had some rights on paper, but what did they mean in practice? Your rights ended wherever the teacher wanted them to. As an adult, that’s flipped — you can walk in, grab five chocolate milks, and take a two-hour recess. Perhaps nutritionally ill-advised, but the point is that when you really have a right, you’re the one who decides how to use it. A right that you have to ask for permission to use is a right that you don’t actually have.
Post offices are the tip of the iceberg.
Gun control in the US dates to a unique period that began in 1934 and ended in 1994. That time was characterized by a steady ratcheting down of federal gun laws every ~30 years (in 1934, 1968, and 1994) and then a final flurry of state-level assault weapons bans from 1989 (after the Stockton shooting in California) to 1994. Until Delaware, Illinois, and Washington passed AWBs in 2022-2023, it was the case that every state with an AWB created its AWB in that 1989-1994 period.
What happened is that in 1989, gun control groups gave up on the multi-decade effort to ban handguns. They pivoted to AWBs in the aftermath of the Stockton shooting, which had been perpetrated with an AK. AWBs were a brand new idea, and so they quickly swept through the handful of states that were receptive to gun control. But that’s as far as they went.
The edifice of federal and state gun laws dates almost entirely to that 60-year period, and the critical thing is that it assumes the nonexistence of gun rights. Sure maybe in some abstract Yankee Doodle sense you had a theoretical right to a musket, but if that right ever conflicted with how serious adults wanted to organize society, the adults would win. And they’d win so automatically as to not even be aware that there was an alternate view. “Carry a gun at the post office? Of course that’s illegal. Who would ever carry a gun at the post office?“
Court cases like the one at the top are what happens when mid-20th-century worldview suddenly finds itself in an environment where gun rights exist. That might make some people uncomfortable. We talked about that in “OSD 109: Sooner or later, help will not arrive”:
When you get deep into gun stuff, it’s easy to spend so much time on gear, stats, education, and all the rest that you forget how simple gun rights really are:
If someone’s trying to hurt you, you have the right to stop them.
That’s it, that’s the whole thing. Interestingly, this is something that essentially everybody believes, at least when applying it to themselves. So when you hear people disagree about gun rights, it’s rare that they truly reject the underlying premise. It’s more that they’re processing their gut reaction to actually taking the idea seriously.
Break it down like that, and nobody actually disagrees with gun rights at a fundamental level. But the negative gut reaction to taking these rights seriously creates cognitive dissonance. The most effective thing we can do in this community is to help people process that positively.
This week’s links
Standup bit about gun nerds
Someone’s been reading “OSD 235: Guns are for nerds”.
“Is 5.7x28mm just overpriced .22 Magnum?”
Breakdown from Lucky Gunner.
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