The United States Postal Service—that slow, steady, rain-or-shine institution that has carried your birthday cards and your electricity bills and your grandmother’s fruitcake for two centuries—is being turned into an armed courier for the very weapons that are already slaughtering our children in their schoolrooms.
For the first time since Calvin Coolidge sat in the White House and Babe Ruth was swatting home runs, the Trump administration wants to let the mailman deliver a handgun right to your door.
No licensed dealer. No background check. Just a stamp and a prayer that nobody notices how many more bodies pile up.
The proposal, pushed forward after the Department of Justice suddenly decided that a perfectly sensible 1927 law is “unconstitutional,” would allow any citizen to mail a pistol or revolver as easily as they would send a pair of socks.
Never mind that Congress passed that law nearly a century ago specifically to keep concealable firearms out of the hands of criminals.
Never mind that the attorneys general of two dozen states—including California’s Rob Bonta and New Jersey’s Jennifer Davenport—have formally condemned the scheme as unlawful and dangerous.
The neo-fascist Republican administration has decided that the Second Amendment requires the postman to become an ammunition carrier.
Lisa McCormick, summoning the kind of plain, hard sense that seems to have evaporated from Washington entirely, wants Garden State lawmakers to stand against the idea that would be laughable if it weren’t so plainly horrifying.
The progressive Democrat from New Jersey took a break from whatever else she was doing to state the obvious: Congress passed the law, so Trump’s Justice Department does not get to wave a magic wand and call it unconstitutional just because it finds the law inconvenient.
“The postal service cannot repeal an act of Congress by changing its own regulations,” said McCormick. “That is not governance. That is a child kicking over the checkerboard because he is losing.”
McCormick did something that passes for bravery in these spineless times. She called out New Jersey’s three Republican representatives in Congress.
She asked Congressmen Tom Kean Jr, Chris Smith, and Jeff VanDrew, to show some backbone. She asked them to oppose a scheme that will make more children and more police officers vulnerable to gun violence.
A simple request. A reasonable request. Which means, of course, that it will likely be ignored by Kean Jr,, and VanDrew.
“Consider the mathematics of this madness, if you can stomach them,” said McCormick. “On average, this nation buries more than 120 human beings every single day from gun deaths. That is nearly 45,000 Americans a year.”
“Guns are now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents,” said McCormick. “Not car accidents. Not cancer. Not drowning. Guns.”
“American children are more likely to die from a bullet than any other child in any other wealthy country on earth,” said McCormick. “The Trump administration’s answer is to mail more firearms directly to the public.”
The National Rifle Association’s John Commerford called this a “key victory for law-abiding gun owners.”
Well, sir, it is certainly a victory for insanity, death and destruction.
McCormick said the attorneys general have it exactly right: there will be no way to guarantee that the person shipping that handgun across state lines is law-abiding.
“There will be no way to guarantee that the felon, the domestic abuser, the mentally ill man with a grudge is not dropping a Glock into a cardboard box and sending it to his cousin in Nevada,” said McCormick. “The postal service does not have the manpower, the mandate, or the moral authority to become a gun runner.”
John Feinblatt of Everytown for Gun Safety put it in plain English: this turns USPS into a “gun trafficking pipeline” while stripping law enforcement of the tools they need to prevent and investigate gun crime.
And he is right. Private carriers like UPS and FedEx already restrict gun shipments to licensed dealers. They know better. Why does the federal government not know better?
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, who watched sixty people die in the Las Vegas massacre of 2017, called the proposal a slap in the face to gun violence survivors and law enforcement.
His state passed background check laws after that horror. Now the Trump administration wants to mail handguns right past those laws. It is not just reckless. It is cruel.
So here we are.
The comment period closed on May 4th, anniversary of the tragic 1970 Kent State University shootings, where the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War.
The postal service claims it is “reviewing comments” but somewhere in Washington, someone is probably already drafting the press release to announce that the mail will now deliver death as reliably as it delivers the daily junk circular.
Lisa McCormick asked New Jersey’s Republicans to show some backbone, which like common sense and basic human decency, seems to be in terribly short supply these days.
The rest of us will be left to bury the results.
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