Fifth Circuit Ruling Upholds Post Office Ban

Eugene Volokh has the story here, and notes:

The reasoning, I’m afraid, is pretty sketchy; it may well be, for instance, that the Second Amendment rule applicable to the government acting as proprietor should be less protective than the rule applicable to the government acting as sovereign, controlling behavior on private property. That’s certainly so in large measure for the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and substantive due process. But it doesn’t follow that there’s no protection offered by the Second Amendment there; that, I think, should take more argument. Nor is it clear that the “sensitive places” exception from Heller should cover parking lots as well as buildings — Heller itself, of course, was quite opaque about the scope of this exception, but I wish that courts applying it went into somewhat more analysis about what makes a place “sensitive” enough to justify gun bans.

Another case of the courts just citing Heller without doing any serious analysis. This opinion is considered “unpublished” which means it does not have precedential value.

UPDATE: Just to make it clear what I think Prof. Volokh is speaking about here, the government may exercise power as a proprietor, and eject someone carrying a firearm from its premises, but when it brings criminal charges unrelated to the exercise of its property rights, it exercises its power as a sovereign, to punish the deed of carrying a gun in a government building.