Nearly a century ago, during Prohibition, federal officials passed a law to prohibit Americans from using the U.S. Postal Service to send concealable firearms through the mail. Ninety-nine years later, a group called the Gun Owners of America — an organization best known for arguing that the National Rifle Association isn’t far enough to the right — is challenging that law in court.

This week, it picked up a powerful ally: Donald Trump’s Justice Department. The Hill reported:

A nearly 100-year-old federal ban on mailing handguns through the U.S. Postal Service is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced, according to an opinion released Thursday by the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The 15-page opinion concluded that a 1927 law, which made it illegal to use the Postal Service to mail concealable firearms, such as pistols and revolvers, infringes on the Second Amendment.

According to the filing from T. Elliot Gaiser, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, restrictions on sending handguns through the mail are unenforceable because such firearms “fall within the core of the ‘arms’ protected by the Second Amendment.”

Time will tell whether this claim fares well in the courts, but one might note that it was just last month that Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Justice Department had opened a new office focused exclusively on the interests of gun owners.

Months earlier, The New York Times reported that the Bondi-led Justice Department was moving forward with plans to slash the number of inspectors who monitor federally licensed gun dealers by two-thirds, “sharply limiting the government’s already crimped capacity to identify businesses that sell guns to criminals.”

The month before that, the Trump administration also decided it would permit the sale of “forced reset triggers,” which can turn semiautomatic weapons into guns that can fire more bullets, more quickly and easily. (Bondi said the move would “enhance public safety,” which seemed to turn reality on its head.)

Alas, we can keep going. After the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, there was bipartisan support for significant new investments in improving mental health support for students as part of an effort to lessen the likelihood of future mass shootings. The Trump administration, however, decided to block $1 billion in grants for student mental health programs, concluding that the programs to reduce gun violence in schools were no longer in “the best interest of the federal government.”

A week before these revelations came to light, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s DOJ had canceled hundreds of grants to community organizations and local governments, “including funding for gun-violence prevention programs.”

Now, that same Justice Department wants people to be able to mail concealable firearms, too, addressing a problem that doesn’t appear to exist.

When thinking about the differences between the president’s first term and his second, this issue is high on the list. As I noted in my first book (see Chapter 8), it was in the wake of a mass school shooting in February 2018 that Trump held an hourlong televised discussion with a group of lawmakers from both parties about gun violence. As part of the conversation, then-Vice President Mike Pence raised the prospect of empowering law enforcement to take weapons away from those who had been reported as potentially dangerous, though he added that he expected to see “due process so no one’s rights are trampled.”

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“Take the firearms first and then go to court,” Trump interjected. At the same event, the president endorsed a law enforcement model in which police officers confiscated some Americans’ guns, “whether they had the right or not.”

When Republicans derailed those negotiations and nothing passed, there was another mass shooting a year later. Trump again advocated for a gun bill that included restrictions on assault rifles — which, according to multiple accounts, was one of his long-sought goals.

So, as recently as his first term, the president at least briefly sought ambitious gun reforms, up to and including extrajudicial gun confiscations.

Last year, after a deadly on-campus shooting at Florida State University, Trump said, “I have an obligation to protect the Second Amendment.” But in the recent past, when he had those same responsibilities, it didn’t stop him from endorsing measures that might have saved lives.

Now, the Republican and his administration not only don’t want to bother, they’re moving aggressively in the opposite direction.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.