The Supreme Court decided Monday to let the federal ban on guns in post offices stand.
Tab Bonidy, a licensed Colorado gun owner, sued to protest the federal law banning guns on post office property, but a federal appellate court ruled in favor of the ban in June, 2015. The Supreme Court decided Monday it would not take up the case, which allows the appellate court’s decision and the gun ban to stand, The Associated Press reports.
Bonidy’s post office in Avon doesn’t deliver to homes, so he has to go pick up his mail at the post office. He is licensed to carry a gun for self defense. Bonidy argued he should be able to bring the gun into the post office, or at least store it in the parking lot outside while he went in to get his mail. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled that the Second Amendment right to bear arms does not extend to federal buildings, though one justice dissented and took Bonidy’s side on the parking lot ban.
The court’s opinion cited a sentence from District of Columbia v. Heller, a case where the Supreme Court in 2008 upheld the right to have a gun for self-defense. The court pointed to one sentence in the key ruling, which says, “[N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial side of arms.” The post office and its parking lot are considered one of those “sensitive places.”
Bonidy appealed to the Supreme Court to no avail.
The Supreme Court in December declined to rule on a Chicago suburb’s ban on semi-automatic rifles with large-capacity magazines. A federal appellate court ruled in February that Maryland’s similar gun control law was unconstitutional. The case has a good chance of going before the Supreme Court.
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