A federal judge in Florida has ruled that a federal law banning the possession of guns in post offices is unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle cited a 2022 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that reinstated Second Amendment rights. Mizelle dismissed part of a charge against Emmanuel Ayala, a postal worker who brought a gun to work.
Ayala was a Postal Service semi-truck driver hauling packages out of a facility located in Tampa, Florida, and had a concealed weapons permit. He carried a Smith & Wesson 9mm firearm in his fanny pack for self-defense while on the job. From time to time, he wore that fanny pack onto Post Office property when retrieving his semi-truck from work “for extra protection on the short walk” to and from the employee parking lot.
On Sept. 14, 2022, Ayala wore his fanny pack, with the gun inside, as he walked from the employee parking lot through the metal turnstiles and into the post office. Federal agents from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General stopped him and tried to detain him. He was later indicted by a grand jury.
Mizelle said the charge against Ayala violated his Second Amendment rights , adding “a blanket restriction on firearms possession in post offices is incongruent with the American tradition of firearms regulation.”
Additionally, “nothing in Supreme Court dicta establishes that the United States may ban firearms in all government buildings. Second, the scope of the Second Amendment right is a legal question, not a factual one, and I need not hold an evidentiary hearing to resolve it. Instead, the government bears the burden to identify historical evidence supporting its challenged regulation.”
She said that post offices existed since the nation’s founding, but federal law didn’t ban guns in government buildings until 1964 and didn’t add post offices to the ban until 1972. No tradition dating back to the 1700s justified such a ban, she said.
“But the Supreme Court has been clear: the government must point to historical principles that would permit it to prohibit firearms possession in post offices,” Mizelle wrote.
In fact, she wrote, “Since the Post Office’s creation, mail carriers have faced the risk of violence. Passengers of nineteenth-century stagecoaches, which carried mail, ‘risked death or injury if coaches were attacked by robbers or Indians.'”
Mizelle has a record of protecting constitutional rights. She is the same judge who ruled in 2022 that the federal government could not force airlines and public transportation to require passengers to mask up when on transportation premises, aircraft, trains, buses, and the like.
The judge declined to dismiss a separate charge for Ayala resisting arrest.
