For 92 years, this law favored by Demcorats stood.
That changed recently, and the people who made it happen wasted no time proving it.
And then Trump had one shocking reaction.
How a Tax Cut Brought Down Nine Decades of Gun Control
US District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee serving in the Northern District of Texas, ruled that the National Firearms Act no longer applies to suppressors and other items whose transfer and making taxes were reduced to zero dollars in July 2025.
In a 66-page opinion, Hendrix found that because Congress had zeroed out the taxes on those items through legislation signed by President Donald Trump, the registration and paperwork requirements imposed by the NFA exceeded Congress’s authority under the taxation power.
Hendrix wrote: “In 2025, Congress eliminated the NFA’s transfer and making taxes for four categories of firearms: short-barreled shotguns, short-barreled rifles, silencers, and a final, defined group of miscellaneous firearms.”
He continued: “Because today’s NFA does not generate any revenue from untaxed firearms, its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power. And there is no sign in the NFA’s text, structure, or statutory history that Congress invoked any other power in crafting the NFA provisions at issue. Thus, the regulatory provisions must be enjoined as unconstitutional because they exceed Congress’s enumerated powers.”
The National Firearms Act dates to the Prohibition era, enacted in response to organized crime. The law required registration with the Internal Revenue Service as part of paying the tax. Then-Attorney General Homer Cummings said the proposal could likely survive court challenge, but only as a tax. The Supreme Court upheld it in 1937 in *Sonzinsky v. United States* on exactly that basis.
Once Congress pulled the tax out from under the law, the legal scaffolding holding the whole thing up came down with it.
The court rejected the government’s attempt to save the regulations under the Commerce Clause. “The challenged NFA provisions are unconstitutional,” Hendrix wrote. “Congress’s choice to eliminate the transfer and making taxes matters, and the defendants cannot save the NFA’s regulatory scheme by referring to a power that Congress never invoked.”
Gun Rights Groups Moved Fast — and the DOJ Let Them
“This is the first time in 92 years that any gun owner has been able to do this,” Aidan Johnston, Gun Owners of America’s director of federal affairs, told Fox News Digital.
Gun Owners of America, congressional candidate Brandon Herrera, and Silencer Shop joined forces to finalize the first unregistered silencer transaction. Herrera and another Republican official bought silencers from Silencer Shop while being members of GOA and without filling out the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives registration form required for nearly the last century.
“For nearly a century, Americans have been forced to beg the federal government for permission to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” Johnston said in a statement. “That changes tonight.”
“GOA worked with Congress to reduce the NFA tax for suppressors and short barrels to zero dollars, and then our legal team finished the job in court,” Johnston told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Judge Hendrix had stayed the judgment for seven days through August 12, 2026, to give the Department of Justice time to seek relief at the Fifth Circuit. The government sought none — the stay lapsed with no appeal filed and no stay motion, and the injunction went into effect for the covered parties.
Representative Andrew Clyde (R-GA) posted online: “I’ve received confirmation from the Trump Administration that the DOJ will NOT appeal our historic court victory against the NFA.”
In an unsigned statement, the Justice Department wrote that it “respects Americans’ Second Amendment rights and is currently assessing the impact of the court’s ruling.”
The Trump-era Department of Justice had continued defending the NFA in court by arguing judges should examine it under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce — a position that put the administration at odds with pro-Second Amendment groups. The DOJ had broadly taken a more friendly approach to gun rights overall, but continued defending certain federal restrictions in court as they came under challenge.
So there was some tension there. The administration’s lawyers were making arguments gun rights groups hated, even as the administration’s legislative team was helping dismantle the very law those lawyers were defending. The DOJ standing down on the appeal resolves that contradiction, at least for now.
What the NRA, Congress, and the States Are Pushing For Next
“Our successful effort to eliminate the $200 NFA tax created the opening for our world-class attorneys to secure this historic federal court ruling that the NFA is unconstitutional. The fight to fully repeal this archaic gun-control measure is not over, but today’s decision is a major step in the right direction,” said John Commerford, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action.
Representative Clyde, the author of the legislation that eliminated the NFA tax on suppressors, short barrels, and any other weapons in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, called it “a historic win against the NFA with fellow pro-2A patriots.”
Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) and Representative Clyde sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche following the ruling, urging the Department of Justice to accept the court’s decision and eliminate the remaining unconstitutional NFA requirements for all gun owners nationwide.
Texas and 14 other Republican-led states had joined the original lawsuit.
What does not change under the ruling: machine guns and destructive devices keep their $200 tax and full NFA coverage, dealer transfers still require a 4473 and NICS background check, and the eight state-level suppressor bans remain untouched.
The ruling covers GOA members, Silencer Shop customers, and the plaintiffs directly tied to the case. Gun owners outside that group still navigate the old NFA process until the courts or Congress extend the relief further.
And that is probably coming. Gun rights organizations have been filing parallel lawsuits across multiple jurisdictions, and the legal logic here is hard to distinguish from those cases. The constitutional foundation was the tax. Congress zeroed the tax. The foundation is gone.
Though an appeal, for gun rights activists, would have carried its own upside — escalation to the Supreme Court, possibly setting the stage for elimination of the NFA entirely, which has for decades been the goal of gun rights groups.
If the ruling survives any future challenge, law-abiding Americans could no longer be subjected to the NFA’s federal registration requirements for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns covered by the decision.
Gun control advocates built the NFA on a tax. President Trump and Congress eliminated the tax. A federal judge recognized the obvious conclusion. And the Justice Department declined to fight it.
The Second Amendment is not a complicated document. The people who have spent decades trying to regulate it into irrelevance built their legal case on a $200 fee. That fee is gone. The case went with it.
Sources: Fox News Digital; Daily Caller News Foundation; Gun Owners of America; Texas Scorecard; Daily Signal; The Reload; Outdoor Life; ZeroHedge/Epoch Times; National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action; Senator Steve Daines press release; Representative Andrew Clyde press release; RifleConfigurator.com; Guns.com; Liberty Nation; NewsNation
