The bottom line
The One Big Beautiful Bill zeroed out the NFA tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and any other weapons. Congress intended to gut the constitutional underpinning of the NFA’s registration regime. The DOJ under Pam Bondi is defending the now-taxless registry anyway. Rep. Andrew Clyde wrote a letter pressing Bondi to stop doing that, and over 30 House Republicans and five senators signed it. One of those senators is John Cornyn. That last detail is not a footnote. It is the story.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
How the NFA has stayed alive for ninety years
The National Firearms Act of 1934 has survived constitutional challenge for almost a century because of a single legal fiction: it is a tax law, not a gun ban. When the Supreme Court first addressed the NFA in United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), and when subsequent courts upheld it, the justification rested on Congress’s taxing power. You want a suppressor, you pay $200 and register it. The registration requirement was treated as an administrative feature of the tax, similar to vehicle registration being an administrative feature of vehicle taxes. It was a terrible argument that required ignoring the obvious Second Amendment problem staring everyone in the face, but the courts went along with it, and the NFA has been the law of the land ever since.
That legal foundation just had a major hole blown through it.
President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law on July 4, 2025. Section 70436 of the bill zeroed out the $200 transfer and manufacture tax for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and any other weapons under the NFA. Machine guns and destructive devices remain at $200. Everything else: $0 starting January 1, 2026.
The registration process itself was left intact. You still fill out the ATF Form 4. You still submit to the background check. You still wait. You just do not pay anything anymore. And that is where the constitutional problem becomes impossible to paper over.
Why a $0 tax destroys the NFA’s legal logic
If the NFA’s registration requirement is constitutional because it is incidental to a tax, what happens when the tax is zero? A $0 tax is not a tax. It is a registry. The two things are legally and constitutionally different in a way that matters enormously.
Congress has broad power to tax. Congress does not have broad power to mandate that citizens register their constitutionally protected property with the federal government. The entire reason the NFA registration survived previous legal challenges was the presence of the $200 payment creating a colorable nexus to the taxing power. Remove the payment and you have nothing but a federal registry of gun owners, which has no constitutional foundation under Bruen and arguably none under Heller either.
The DOJ is aware of this. Litigation has already arrived. Three cases are now pending: Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF in the Northern District of Texas, Chris Brown v. ATF in the Eastern District of Missouri, and Jensen v. ATF, also in the Northern District of Texas. Gun Owners of America filed a motion for summary judgment in one of these cases. The plaintiffs’ argument is straightforward: Congress eliminated the taxes, the regulations that remained are no longer supported by any enumerated constitutional power, and they must fall.
The DOJ’s response, filed in late November 2025, argued that the registration requirements survive because NFA-regulated businesses still pay a Special Occupational Tax on manufacturing and dealing. That is a stretch that strains credibility. The SOT paid by commercial dealers has nothing to do with the constitutional basis for requiring individual citizens to register their personal property. The DOJ knows this argument is weak. It is making it anyway.
What Clyde’s letter says and who signed it
Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia’s 9th District, himself a licensed gun dealer, wrote a letter to Attorney General Bondi calling on DOJ to stop defending the zero-tax registration requirement. He pointed out that Congress’s intent in zeroing the tax was to undermine the NFA’s constitutional rationale, not preserve a registry while stripping out the only element that made it defensible. The letter was signed by over 30 House Republicans, including Lauren Boebert, Wesley Hunt, Mary Miller, and Derek Schmidt, along with five senators.
The House signatories are who you expect. They are the reliably pro-2A members who have been fighting this fight for years. None of that surprises me.
The senate signatories are different. And one of them specifically changes everything about how you should read this situation.
What Cornyn’s signature actually means
John Cornyn co-authored the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, signed alongside Chris Murphy, Kyrsten Sinema, and Thom Tillis. That bill provided financial incentives for states to adopt red flag laws, expanded background check requirements, and tightened the definition of who qualifies as a federally licensed firearm dealer. Cornyn introduced it on the eve of the Bruen decision, when the Second Amendment movement was about to receive one of its greatest judicial victories in history. He has been booed at the Texas state Republican convention over it. His Democratic co-authorship of the bill has become a centerpiece of Ken Paxton’s primary challenge against him.
Cornyn is currently in a runoff against Paxton for his Senate seat, with the election scheduled for May 26, 2026. He knows his record on gun rights is a liability. He knows the base he needs to turn out remembers what he did in 2022. He is not signing this letter because he suddenly discovered a principled commitment to Second Amendment jurisprudence. He is signing it because he has concluded that attaching his name to NFA reform is politically necessary for his survival.
That calculation tells you something important about the state of the Second Amendment movement that no single court victory or legislative win communicates on its own.
The one-way ratchet
Consider the terrain of conservative issues over the last thirty years. Immigration has moved in both directions. Abortion went one direction for decades, then the other. Gay marriage moved in one direction and stopped. On nearly every major issue in the conservative coalition, there have been setbacks, retreats, compromises, and defeats alongside the wins.
The Second Amendment has been different. From the mid-1990s to today, the movement has moved in essentially one direction. Concealed carry has gone from legal in a handful of states to the default in almost the entire country. The Supreme Court has delivered Heller, McDonald v. City of Chicago, and Bruen. Assault weapons bans that were considered mainstream gun policy in 1994 are now facing federal litigation from the Department of Justice. The NFA tax on suppressors just got zeroed out in a reconciliation bill.
Cornyn knows this. He is not signing this letter to lead. He is signing it because the momentum of the movement has made not signing it a political liability that could cost him his seat to a candidate who has been explicit about being more aggressive on gun rights. That is what a one-way ratchet looks like in practice. It is not just winning in court. It is winning in the political calculation of people who are not true believers.
What I actually think about Bondi on this
I have defended Bondi where I thought it was fair. She did put genuinely pro-2A people below her in the department and gave them room to operate. Harmeet Dhillon’s Second Amendment Section would not exist without Bondi’s sign-off, and the cases that section has filed are real and meaningful.
But Bondi defending the zero-tax NFA registry is indefensible. It is not a close call. The DOJ’s legal argument is thin and she has to know it. There is precedent for the DOJ declining to defend laws it views as unconstitutional. The Obama DOJ declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. The option exists. She is choosing not to use it here.
The most charitable reading is that the Trump White House has not yet made a decision to stop defending the NFA as a whole and DOJ is running the clock. A less charitable reading is that the administration is not willing to take the political heat of being seen as abandoning the NFA while machine gun and destructive device taxes remain in place. Either way, Congress pressing Bondi publicly through a signed letter creates a record and puts pressure on that decision.
The litigation will force the issue regardless. When federal courts start issuing rulings on whether a $0 tax can still constitutionally compel registration of firearms, DOJ will have to decide how hard it fights to preserve a registry it has no principled reason to defend. Cornyn and thirty-plus members of Congress putting their names on a letter makes that harder to ignore.
We are winning. This is what winning looks like when you are not yet finished.
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