This is big news.
Judge takes sledgehammer to National Firearms Act
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Firearms Act (NFA) no longer applies to suppressors and other items whose taxes were reduced to $0 in July 2025.
United States District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, granted a motion for summary judgement from attorneys representing the Silencer Shop Foundation Wednesday.
A summary judgement!!!!
It was NOT a Second Amendment based decision:
Thank the GOP legislators and President Trump for enabling this win. The gun organizations had a relatively easy layup in court.
The Four Boxes Diner has the best legal take. Something you should know is that the decision only applies to the plaintiffs, their members, and their customers. It is not nation-wide. It only applies to people in the federal district court in the Northern District of Texas:
The plaintiffs include:
- Gun Owners of America
- The National Rifle Association
- B&T USA, LLC
- Palmetto State Armory, LLC
- SilencerCo Weapons Research, LLC
- The Virginia Citizens Defense League
- The Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition
- Fifteen states
- Silencer Shop Foundation
That NRA membership is still good for something!
I don’t know for certain how the “fifteen states” plays out in this context. We will need some clarification from a lawyer on that. My guess is that the Feds can’t prosecute any of those state that makes, uses, or sells silencers, SBR, and SBS. But, I am not a lawyer.
CCRKBA WIN: FED. JUDGE SAYS SUPPRESSOR, SBR NFA REGISTRATION UNCONSTITUTIONAL – CCRKBA
Giffords exposes themselves as liars again. Kostas Moros assists in making it obvious:
They cannot imagine it was about anything other than about money. They need to think of a new rationalization. This one is so boring. Can’t they come up with something just as nonsensical and not so boring? I’d like to suggest:
- The NFA was needed to assist in alcohol prohibition, and we need it now for recreational drug prohibition!
- Protecting the hearing of gun owners takes away another reason to ban guns!
- Short barrels bad, long barrels good!
This is very good, but I suspect that anti-gun states like Washington will make it a priority to regulate them at the state level in the next legislative term if they can.
I just came across this- pretty good summary on what types of things the gun-grabbers will do next, and how they are fighting it.
Agreed. But a lot of toys will be collected before then in anticipation of the new laws. The 2nd Amendment challenges will hit the courts in states like California, which already ban them, before more states restrict them.
By ruling the NFA is a tax and only a tax and is based on nothing but the taxing power, it does make changes to the NFA within the scope of changes made in Congress in reconciliation, passable through the Senate with just 50+1 votes. The Senator parliamentarian that got in the way of putting the full Hearing Protection Act into the OBBBA in reconciliation hasn’t got a leg to stand on anymore.
That can be both good and bad, but to add new things to the NFA would require additional up-front appropriations to set up the databases, the forms, the record keeping, the training, the regulatory developments, etc. and that would be out of scope for reconciliation. Removing things is straightforward.
Having suppressors, SBRs and SBSs out of the NFA, even for part of the country, breaks the “we cover everything” legal shield of the registry. “I’m an NRA Life member and I bought this suppressor in the Northern District of Texas, free and clear, before returning to my home state” is going to be a statement that the government will have to overcome if it wants to prosecute for possession of an untaxed suppressor, especially if the accused can point to a 4473 in a gun store in northern Texas. is a 4473 even needed? The entire reason suppressors are treated as firearms is a single line in the NFA, in support of implementing the tax.
But we’re not out of the woods until the rest of the infrastructure of the NFA goes away. Just one day of the rests not being authorized means all existing records lose their legal basis, and must be destroyed because they support a tax and only a tax and when the tax is gone the basis for everything goes away. The Congress would have to start from zero with millions things in private possession and they’d have no legal way to know about them.
Responding to myself, but just had a following thought…
SBRs and SBSs exist in the NFA as a means to patch the hole around the tax on pistols. Pistols were originally going to be in the NFA. At the last minute, they pulled pistols out (and stuck in suppressors without a moment of debate) but they didn’t clean up after themselves and left in the definition of SBRs and SBSs in support of the tax. This is also the reason why the NFA mandated informing the BATFE if you were moving an MG, SBR or SBS, but not a suppressor, because the 1934 Congress was sloppy.
With the tax gone, SBRs and SBSs aren’t anything but firearms (in the Northern District of Texas, for members of the class, for now). They might be ‘pistols’ as firearms with barrels under 18″. Any other part of law (including state laws) that refers to the federal definition of SBRs and SBSs definition is now a dangling pointer to a legal nullity. Adding a stock to a pistol no longer ‘manufactures’ a taxable item, as it is not taxed.
The arbitrary definition of SBR or SBS exist solely to implement a tax. That tax no longer exists, as the court explains. So the definition of those things no longer exists in that district for that class of plaintiffs. If the ruling goes national, the definition no longer exists within the territories of the USA.
Then we get to state laws regarding these ARMS which are applicable to ALL THE PEOPLE where they are either directly reducing, restricting or restraining an ENUMERATED RIGHT and they catch a facial challenge under the 2A, or they are implementing their own tax which may get an as-applied challenge until the implementation of the tax does not have a chilling effect on that right. They might get away with a small sales tax, but only if they implement it in a way where they act like they are in a hurry to collect that revenue. The “we have to decide if you’re allowed to pay this tax” is an as-applied may-issue licensing regime, which is prohibited.
For some reason, I thought the NFA was a response to the super criminals of the 30s – Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and the like.
It was.
And Congress wanted to ban the guns used but they knew it would get overturned instantly on 2A grounds.
So they wrote the NFA as a tax. A big tax; having a spare $200 lying around in 1934 was Rockefeller money.
But go read the transcript of Congressional testimony: they’re swearing up and down, it’s a tax, it’s a tax, it’s a tax, nothing but a tax, anything else and it’d be a violation of the 2A and immediately overturned, but it’s a tax and that’s why it’s OK to vote for it, Representative!
Yeah, we saw that with Roberts and his Obamacare opinion. “What you’re doing should be unconstitutional, but since it’s a tax, I’m going to let it stand.” I still think he was blackmailed or coerced into writing that opinion
“I still think he was blackmailed or coerced into writing that opinion”
Disturbingly plausible – we do have strong evidentiary support to believe he changed his mind very late in the process, after decision and dissent were written, long after judges are usually locked in.