WHEN OBJECTS ARE ACCUSED AND PEOPLE ARE ERASED

The DOJ, the USPS, and the Collapse of the “Inherently Dangerous” Fiction

For nearly a century, a quiet assumption governed federal firearms policy in the United States: that a handgun, by its mere existence, constituted a threat so severe that its movement through the nation’s mail system had to be prohibited outright for ordinary citizens. This assumption did not arise from a demonstrated pattern of harm tied to postal transport. It was not built on statistical necessity, documented abuse, or an identifiable public safety failure within the mail system itself. It rested instead on symbolism — on the idea that certain objects could be treated as dangerous actors independent of human intent.

Language did the work that evidence did not.

The term “inherently dangerous” became the justification. It functioned as a rhetorical dead end, a phrase designed to foreclose scrutiny rather than invite it. Once applied, no further analysis was required. The object was presumed guilty. The citizen was presumed suspect. The burden quietly shifted away from the state and onto the individual, not because of conduct, but because of possession.

This framing endured not because it was constitutionally sound, but because it was rarely challenged during a period when Second Amendment doctrine itself was treated as negotiable, conditional, and subordinate to regulatory convenience. For decades, the federal government maintained the position that a law-abiding citizen could be trusted to own a handgun, but not trusted to place that same unloaded handgun into a sealed box and send it through a federal mail system that already transports vastly more hazardous materials every day.

That contradiction was never resolved. It was merely normalized.

That normalization has now collapsed.

In January 2026, the Department of Justice, through its Office of Legal Counsel, formally concluded that the federal statute barring ordinary, law-abiding citizens from mailing handguns through the United States Postal Service cannot withstand constitutional scrutiny under modern Second Amendment jurisprudence. The opinion did not hinge on policy preference or administrative discretion. It rested on constitutional analysis shaped by Supreme Court precedent that no longer permits symbolic restrictions divorced from historical tradition.

This was not a narrow procedural loss for the government. It was an abandonment of a long-held position.

By acknowledging that the statute cannot be enforced consistent with the Constitution, the DOJ implicitly conceded that the “inherently dangerous” framing fails as a legal standard. Dangerousness alone — particularly when untethered from misuse, intent, or historical analogue — is not sufficient to justify a categorical ban on the transport of constitutionally protected arms. The Second Amendment does not protect objects because they are benign. It protects arms precisely because they are effective, and because responsibility rests with the individual, not the tool.

What unraveled here was not merely a postal restriction. It was a regulatory habit: the habit of assigning agency to objects in order to avoid confronting human accountability. By treating firearms as autonomous threats rather than inert tools, the law inverted the very principles on which criminal responsibility and constitutional rights are based.

This article is not about celebration, victory laps, or political signaling. It is about record-keeping. Because moments like this — moments where the federal government quietly retreats from a position it can no longer defend — are often softened, mischaracterized, or reframed until their significance disappears into administrative noise.

That will not happen here.

This reversal matters because it exposes how easily language can substitute for logic, how long a legal fiction can persist once normalized, and how fragile such fictions become when constitutional standards are finally applied without deference to fear.

---

A Ban Built on Language, Not Logic

The law at issue, codified in 1927, imposed a categorical prohibition on private citizens mailing pistols, revolvers, and other concealable firearms through the federal postal system. It did not arise from a documented crisis involving mailed handguns. It did not follow a pattern of postal violence traceable to civilian firearm shipments. There was no wave of intercepted crimes, no statistical emergency, no systemic failure that demanded immediate correction.

Instead, the statute reflected a mood — a period anxiety shaped by Prohibition-era crime, political pressure, and a growing appetite for symbolic control. Rather than address criminal misuse directly, lawmakers opted for a simpler mechanism: restrict lawful transport and call it prevention.

The carve-outs reveal the nature of the decision. Licensed dealers were exempt. Government agencies were exempt. The military was exempt. The assumption was not that firearms themselves were uncontrollable or unsafe in transit, but that ordinary citizens could not be trusted with the same act. The object remained identical. Only the identity of the person shipping it changed.

That distinction was never grounded in risk analysis. It was grounded in posture.

The justification, when articulated at all, relied almost entirely on a single phrase: “inherently dangerous.” Once applied, the inquiry ended. No further justification was required. The phrase functioned as a regulatory full stop — an assertion of authority rather than an explanation.

But authority is not analysis.

“Inherently dangerous” does not appear in the Constitution. It is not a legal standard used by the Founders. It does not originate in early American law governing arms, transport, or commerce. It is a modern administrative invention, deployed to short-circuit debate by suggesting that some objects possess a will of their own — that danger flows from existence rather than use.

That framing collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

Danger is not an inherent moral quality of an object. It is a relationship between intent, capability, and action. Fire, electricity, vehicles, chemicals, tools, and machinery all possess the capacity to cause harm. None are regulated on the theory that they act independently of human decision-making. Responsibility remains with the user. Always has.

If “inherent dangerousness” were a legitimate governing principle rather than a rhetorical convenience, the modern postal system would be impossible to operate. The USPS routinely transports lithium-ion batteries capable of spontaneous ignition, industrial solvents, corrosive chemicals, compressed gases, heavy machinery components, cutting tools, and equipment designed explicitly to exert destructive force. These items are regulated through packaging, labeling, and handling requirements — not banned outright based on symbolism.

Chainsaws are mailed. Axes are mailed. Sledgehammers are mailed. Industrial tools with lethal potential move through the system daily without being anthropomorphized, moralized, or presumed criminal. None are treated as autonomous threats. None are accused of intent. None are singled out for constitutional suspicion.

Only firearms are subjected to this inversion of logic.

The difference is not danger.
The difference is what firearms represent.

Firearms are regulated not because they are uniquely hazardous in transit, but because they embody decentralized power — power that does not originate from the state, does not require permission to exist, and cannot be easily recalled once distributed. By labeling them “inherently dangerous,” regulators avoided having to justify restrictions under historical or constitutional standards. Language replaced logic. Fear replaced analysis.

That substitution worked for decades because it went largely unchallenged. Once challenged under modern Second Amendment doctrine, it failed almost immediately.

The ban did not collapse because society became more reckless. It collapsed because the legal system was forced to confront a truth it had long deferred: objects do not commit acts; people do. And laws built on pretending otherwise cannot survive sustained constitutional scrutiny.

That is what unraveled here — not merely a postal restriction, but an entire way of regulating by symbolism instead of substance.

---

The Constitutional Problem Regulators Couldn’t Escape

The Department of Justice’s reversal did not emerge from political whim or administrative generosity. It was the inevitable result of a constitutional framework that regulators could no longer evade. For decades, firearms restrictions survived not because they were rigorously justified, but because the Second Amendment itself was treated as an outlier — a right discussed in abstractions, hedged with exceptions, and subordinated to regulatory convenience.

That era is over.

Modern Supreme Court jurisprudence has made clear that the Second Amendment is not a symbolic relic or a conditional allowance. It protects a functional right — one that encompasses possession, acquisition, transport, and practical access to arms in common use. A right that cannot be exercised in reality is not a right at all; it is a suggestion. The Court has explicitly rejected that dilution.

This shift imposed a structural problem regulators could not solve.

Under the framework established in District of Columbia v. Heller and reinforced in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the burden no longer rests on citizens to prove why a restriction is unreasonable. It rests squarely on the government to demonstrate that a challenged firearms regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of regulation at the time of the Founding. Modern policy preferences, speculative safety arguments, and generalized fear are insufficient. History is the controlling authority.

That burden proved fatal to the USPS handgun ban.

There is no historical tradition in early American law of prohibiting the peaceful transport of lawfully owned arms through common carriers. To the contrary, firearms were routinely transported by horse, wagon, ship, and rail as a matter of ordinary commerce and necessity. Early Americans lived in a world where arms ownership was assumed, mobility was essential, and centralized enforcement was limited. The idea that the federal government could categorically bar citizens from transporting their own arms through public infrastructure would have been foreign to the Founding generation.

No founding-era statute imposed a blanket ban on mailing or shipping firearms based solely on their type. No analogue exists that treats concealable arms as uniquely suspect simply because of their size. Regulations addressed misuse, not movement. Conduct, not possession. Criminal intent, not hypothetical danger.

The USPS ban had no historical twin to anchor it. It existed in isolation — a twentieth-century artifact propped up by deference rather than precedent.

For decades, that weakness went untested because the legal environment allowed it to. Courts often applied watered-down scrutiny, deferred to legislative assertions of safety, and tolerated symbolic restrictions so long as they appeared administratively tidy. The ban survived not because it was constitutionally sound, but because it lived in a permissive era where fear-based regulation was rarely forced to justify itself against original meaning.

Once that permissive era ended, the ban had nowhere to hide.

When subjected to the history-and-tradition test demanded by modern doctrine, the argument collapsed almost immediately. The government could not point to a comparable founding-era restriction. It could not demonstrate a consistent lineage of regulation. It could not explain why lawful transport through a common carrier was suddenly incompatible with a right explicitly designed to be exercised by ordinary citizens.

At that point, the outcome was no longer discretionary.

The DOJ’s conclusion reflects this reality. It is not an endorsement of firearms culture, nor a repudiation of public safety. It is an acknowledgment that constitutional rights cannot be regulated into irrelevance by substituting modern anxieties for historical authority. When symbolism is stripped away and scrutiny is applied, restrictions untethered from tradition do not survive.

That is what regulators could not escape.

The Second Amendment, once treated as an exception, is now treated as a rule. And rules, unlike slogans, demand consistency.

---

The Quiet Admission That Matters Most

The most consequential aspect of the Department of Justice’s action is not the downstream policy effect, nor the procedural adjustment it will eventually force within the postal system. It is the acknowledgment embedded within the decision itself — an acknowledgment the federal government did not advertise, but could no longer avoid.

By formally declining to enforce the statute and advising that it cannot withstand constitutional review, the Department of Justice implicitly conceded something far larger than the fate of a single regulation: that the long-standing reliance on the “inherently dangerous” framing fails as a constitutional justification. It is not merely weak. It is incompatible with the structure of American law once that structure is taken seriously.

That concession matters because it strikes at the foundation of an entire regulatory mindset.

The “inherently dangerous” argument does not fail on technical grounds. It fails on first principles. It cannot survive contact with responsibility, intent, or historical reality. It attempts to assign moral agency to an object in order to avoid confronting the conduct of individuals — a move that may feel intuitively satisfying in moments of public anxiety, but which collapses under constitutional scrutiny.

A boxed or unboxed, unloaded handgun does not act.
It does not decide.
It does not threaten.
It does not acquire intent—sealed or unsealed—while moving among parcels of tools, batteries, chemicals, and machinery.

Without a human being exercising will, there is no action to regulate.

To argue otherwise is to invert the logic of criminal law itself. American jurisprudence is built on the premise that culpability arises from mens rea and actus reus — intent and action. Remove human agency from the equation and the legal system ceases to function. Objects cannot form intent. They cannot be deterred. They cannot be punished. They cannot be held accountable.

Yet for decades, firearms regulation quietly relied on precisely that inversion: treating tools as threats and citizens as latent risks simply by association. The DOJ’s reversal represents a rare moment where that inversion is implicitly rejected by the very institution that once defended it.

This matters beyond firearms.

Once the state begins assigning blame to objects rather than behavior, law becomes symbolic rather than corrective. Accountability dissolves. Responsibility is displaced. Policy becomes performative — designed to signal control rather than produce lawful outcomes. That approach may generate headlines, but it corrodes the foundations of rights-based governance.

The DOJ’s acknowledgment signals a recognition that constitutional rights cannot be regulated through metaphor. You cannot preserve due process by pretending intent migrates from people into tools. You cannot uphold the Second Amendment by tolerating standards that would be laughable if applied anywhere else in the legal system.

This was not a dramatic admission. It was a quiet one. But quiet admissions often matter the most — because they reveal what can no longer be defended, even by those who once relied on it.

What collapsed here was not merely a postal restriction. It was a legal fiction: the idea that public safety is best served by erasing human agency and blaming objects instead.

Once that fiction was forced into the open, it could not survive.

---

The Absurd End Point of Object Blame

Follow the logic far enough and it does not merely weaken — it disintegrates into parody.

If firearms are dangerous because they exist, then responsibility no longer resides with individuals. Human judgment becomes irrelevant. Negligence becomes immaterial. Criminal intent is demoted to a secondary concern, if it matters at all. Training, lawful ownership, secure handling, and purpose are reduced to cosmetic details. The object itself becomes the culprit, accused not for what it has done, but for what it might represent.

That inversion is not accidental. It is convenient.

Once blame is transferred from people to objects, accountability becomes abstract. There is no longer a need to address why crimes occur, who commits them, or what failures of judgment, enforcement, or intervention allowed them to happen. Instead, governance shifts toward managing symbols — banning, restricting, or ritualistically condemning tools as a substitute for confronting human behavior.

This is how serious governance erodes quietly.

Not through sweeping authoritarian decrees, but through lazy language that substitutes metaphor for responsibility. Tools are anthropomorphized. Citizens are reduced to risk profiles. Law becomes a system of preemptive suspicion rather than individualized accountability. The state no longer regulates actions; it manages perceived threats.

Once this logic is accepted, there is no limiting principle.

If a firearm is culpable by existence alone, then so is any object capable of harm. Vehicles, tools, chemicals, machines, infrastructure — all become candidates for prohibition based not on misuse, but on potential. At that point, law ceases to function as a system of justice and becomes a mechanism of control driven by fear gradients rather than facts.

The consequences are predictable. When objects are blamed, people are absolved. When intent is ignored, prevention becomes impossible. When responsibility is displaced, policy becomes theatrical — producing rules that signal moral posture while failing to address underlying causes.

The Department of Justice’s reversal interrupts that drift — at least in this instance. It reasserts a foundational legal truth that should never have been negotiable: objects do not act; people do. Harm arises from decisions, not from inert matter. Law exists to govern conduct, not to wage symbolic campaigns against tools.

What was rejected here was not just a postal restriction. It was a dangerous habit of thought — one that treats citizens as variables to be managed and rights as inconveniences to be softened through language.

When that habit is allowed to persist, liberty does not disappear overnight. It erodes gradually, justified by phrases that sound reasonable until followed to their logical end.

This time, the logic was followed.

And it did not survive.

---

What This Decision Does—and Does Not—Do

This decision does not instantly rewrite postal regulations. It does not flip a switch at the United States Postal Service, nor does it compel immediate operational changes without further administrative action. It does not override state-level firearms laws, licensing requirements, or transport restrictions that remain independently enforceable. It does not eliminate background check regimes where they lawfully apply, nor does it create an unregulated free-for-all in firearms commerce or movement.

Any claim to the contrary is either rooted in misunderstanding or offered in bad faith.

The Department of Justice did not announce the end of firearms regulation. It acknowledged the constitutional failure of a specific federal statute — nothing more, nothing less. This distinction matters, because exaggeration has long been used to discredit legitimate constitutional corrections by portraying them as reckless or extreme.

What this decision does do is far more precise — and far more consequential.

By declining to enforce the statute, the federal government formally withdrew its authority from a restriction that could not be reconciled with the Constitution under modern scrutiny. That withdrawal signals that symbolic regulations, particularly those lacking historical grounding, are no longer insulated by inertia or tradition alone. Longevity is not legitimacy. Age is not authority.

The decision also establishes a clear warning to regulators: restrictions that exist primarily to soothe discomfort or project control — rather than to address demonstrable misconduct consistent with historical precedent — are increasingly vulnerable. The era in which a law could survive solely because it had “always been there” is rapidly closing.

Just as importantly, the decision clarifies what the Second Amendment protects in practice. Rights are not contingent on emotional response. They do not rise or fall based on whether an object unsettles observers or complicates political messaging. Constitutional protections are not aesthetic judgments. They are legal guarantees.

Firearm owners did not gain a new privilege through this decision. They regained recognition of an old one: that lawful conduct cannot be restricted simply because it involves an object that carries symbolic weight. The Constitution does not bend to discomfort. It does not yield to optics. It does not defer to fear disguised as safety.

What happened here is narrow in scope but broad in implication. A single statute fell, but the reasoning that sustained it was exposed. And once exposed, it becomes far harder to reuse elsewhere without facing the same scrutiny.

This decision does not mark the end of debate.
It marks the end of pretense.

From here forward, restrictions must stand on history, logic, and constitutional consistency — not on language designed to end conversations before they begin.

---

Why This Moment Matters Beyond Firearms

This is not only a Second Amendment story. It is a governance story — one that reaches far beyond firearms and into how power justifies itself in modern regulatory systems.

When the state begins regulating based on perceived danger rather than demonstrated misuse, the limiting principle disappears. Risk becomes speculative. Enforcement becomes anticipatory. Citizens are no longer judged by conduct, but by association with objects, behaviors, or categories deemed politically inconvenient. Once that threshold is crossed, regulation no longer corrects harm — it attempts to preempt it through control.

That model does not stop expanding on its own.

When language replaces evidence, restraint dissolves. Words like “inherently dangerous,” “public safety,” and “preventative necessity” become elastic tools, capable of stretching to justify almost anything. The more emotionally charged the object or activity, the easier it becomes to bypass scrutiny. Over time, governance shifts away from adjudicating actions and toward managing discomfort.

This is how systems drift — quietly, incrementally, and with broad public acquiescence.

The significance of the DOJ’s action lies in the fact that this drift was interrupted not by outrage, not by protest, and not by political theater, but by legal reasoning applied without deference to symbolism. The statute fell because it could not be defended once history, constitutional structure, and accountability were taken seriously. That is a rare occurrence in an era where many regulations survive precisely because they are never forced to justify themselves honestly.

What was reversed here was not merely a firearms restriction. It was a pattern of governance that relies on abstract fear to excuse concrete overreach.

No privilege was granted in this moment. No special status was conferred. What happened instead was something far more important and far less common: a fiction was removed. The fiction that safety is achieved by blaming objects. The fiction that rights can be narrowed by rhetorical labeling. The fiction that longevity excuses constitutional weakness.

Once those fictions are stripped away, the implications extend far beyond any single policy domain. They remind the state — and the public — that authority is constrained, that rights are functional, and that governance must ultimately answer to reality rather than manage perception.

That is why this moment matters.
Not because it ends a debate, but because it proves one still exists — and that, occasionally, the law still listens.

---

Closing Record

The Constitution was not written to protect objects that are comfortable, convenient, or free of consequence. It was written to protect rights that matter precisely because they are powerful, consequential, and capable of being misused. A right that only applies to harmless things is not a right at all — it is a permission slip.

The Second Amendment was drafted with full awareness of danger. Its authors lived in a world where violence was not abstract, where arms were commonplace, and where responsibility was understood as a human obligation rather than something to be engineered away. They did not attempt to sanitize reality. They structured liberty around it.

The USPS handgun ban failed because it abandoned that structure. It attempted to criminalize lawful transport by pretending that tools possess intent, that danger exists independently of decision, and that responsibility can be displaced from people onto objects. That fiction allowed the law to survive for decades, not because it was sound, but because it was convenient.

Convenience is not constitutionality.

When law forgets that distinction, accountability dissolves and rights become negotiable. Regulation shifts from governing conduct to managing symbols. Citizens become variables. Liberty erodes not in a single dramatic act, but through accumulation — restriction by restriction, justified by language that sounds reasonable until examined closely.

This decision did not create new freedoms. It restored an old boundary. It reminded the state that constitutional rights cannot be regulated through metaphor, fear, or discomfort. They must be confronted honestly, justified historically, and constrained narrowly.

When law remembers that responsibility resides with people — not objects — liberty does not triumph. It simply survives.

And survival, in an age of symbolic governance, is no small thing.

---

TRJ Verdict

This ruling does not signal leniency. It signals discipline — constitutional discipline that had been absent for far too long.

For nearly a century, the federal government maintained a restriction it could not justify under the very framework it was sworn to uphold. It survived not because it worked, not because it was necessary, and not because it was historically grounded, but because it relied on language designed to end scrutiny rather than withstand it. “Inherently dangerous” became a substitute for reasoning. Fear became a proxy for law.

That substitution failed the moment it was tested honestly.

The Department of Justice’s decision marks a rare corrective in modern governance: a retreat from symbolism, an acknowledgment that rights cannot be managed through metaphor, and a reminder that constitutional protections are not contingent on comfort or optics. When a regulation cannot be defended by history, logic, or accountability, it does not become valid through repetition. It becomes exposed.

This verdict is not about firearms alone. It is about limits — limits on how far the state may go in regulating lawful conduct by blaming objects instead of addressing behavior. It is about reaffirming that responsibility resides with people, that intent matters, and that constitutional rights do not evaporate when they become inconvenient.

No privilege was granted here.
No loophole was created.
No public safety principle was abandoned.

What was abandoned was a legal fiction.

And in its place stands something far more durable: the rule that power must justify itself, that fear is not evidence, and that liberty — when treated seriously — does not need to apologize for existing.

TRJ Verdict:
When language fails, the Constitution still speaks.

---

Legal analysis and constitutional findings in this report are grounded in the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel Memorandum Opinion, Constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 1715 (Jan. 15, 2026), authored by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser.

---

Primary Source Document:
Constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 1715 — Memorandum Opinion for the Attorney General, January 15, 2026. (Free Download)

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

🔥 NOW AVAILABLE! 🔥

‎👉 Eclipsera – Apple Music

---

---

---

---