AG Jennings leads coalition to oppose Postal Service’s guns-by-mail schemme

Attorney General Kathy Jennings on Monday co-led a multistate comment letter signed by 24 states opposing an unlawful proposal by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to allow a flood of prohibited weapons across state borders by mail.

Since 1927, federal law-passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president-has barred the USPS from mailing certain concealable firearms. In January 2026 the Trump Administration, through a U.S. Department of Justice opinion, departed with precedent and the law alike by arbitrarily choosing to stop following the law on the erroneous basis that the time-tested statute is unconstitutional. On April 2, the USPS published a proposed rule to conform with this DOJ opinion.

"Law enforcement's job is hard enough without the President's plan to send guns to anyone with a mailbox," said AG Jennings. "This commonsense, bipartisan gun safety legislation began as a Republican idea. It has withstood scrutiny from the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the U.S. government for a century. The facts, and the Constitution, are as plain now as they were then. The president's indifference to the law doesn't change that."

Jennings' letter explains that existing law is both commonsense and constitutional, and that the proposed rule is unlawful and will endanger public safety in the states. The letter notes that the executive branch cannot unilaterally permit conduct which Congress has prohibited since 1927. Unlike private carriers like UPS, USPS recognizes no statutory obligation to ensure its packages comply with state laws on the acquisition or transfer of firearms. Guns-by-mail would thus circumvent licensed sellers and open a yawning loophole for felons, domestic abusers and other prohibited people to access guns-including certain guns and accessories prohibited under multiple states' law. USPS's guns-by-mail scheme would undermine Delaware law enforcement and make it far more difficult, and more expensive, to solve gun crimes.

The guns by mail proposal would also inhibit the states' ability to identify gun sellers and buyers in trafficking investigations. In 2023, Delaware used data from ATF's ETrace system to successfully identify the purchasers of 79% of crime guns searched in 2023. Without federal firearms trace data, law enforcement agencies would have to completely rebuild their crime gun tracing infrastructure to account for the unregulated mailing of concealable firearms through USPS, straining department budgets that have already been harrowed by the Trump Administration's economic and fiscal chaos.

AG Jennings co-led this letter with the attorneys general of New Jersey and New York. They were joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.