The bottom line
The One Big Beautiful Bill, signed July 4, 2025, zeroed out the $200 NFA tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and any other weapons, effective January 1, 2026. The registration process still stands and the DOJ under Pam Bondi is fighting to keep it. But the only legal justification that made the NFA defensible as a taxing measure is gone, and the lawsuits building on that fact are already in federal court.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What happened on January 1, 2026
Today is the first day since 1934 that an American can walk into a gun store, fill out the paperwork for a suppressor or a short-barreled rifle, and not hand the federal government $200 as a condition of exercising a constitutional right.
That is not a small thing. I know the registration process is still there. I know the ATF still has to approve the transfer. I know Pam Bondi’s DOJ is actively defending the registry in court and arguing it has independent constitutional footing. None of that changes the historical significance of what happened today, which is that Congress removed the taxing authority that was the sole justification offered when the National Firearms Act was passed in 1934 and defended for the nine decades since.
The One Big Beautiful Bill, HR.1, was signed into law by President Trump on July 4, 2025. Buried inside a massive reconciliation package was a provision eliminating the $200 transfer tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and any other weapons. The $5 tax on AOWs is gone too. These changes took effect today.
The Senate Parliamentarian blocked a broader reform package under the Byrd Rule, ruling that full elimination of NFA registration requirements exceeded the scope of what could be included in reconciliation. That is why the registration process survives. It is not because Congress wanted to keep it. Thirty House Republicans sent a letter to Bondi in November 2025 explicitly stating that congressional intent was full repeal of the NFA, not just the tax elimination, and demanding the DOJ stop defending the registry. She has not complied.
That fight is ongoing. But today, January 1st, 2026, is still a genuine milestone.
Why the tax was the whole argument
To understand what today actually means legally, you have to understand why the NFA was structured around a tax in the first place.
When Congress passed the National Firearms Act in 1934, the explicit intent was to make certain categories of firearms prohibitively expensive to own. The law was designed to target what legislators called gangster firearms: machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers. Handguns were originally included in the draft legislation but were removed after lobbying by the NRA. What remained was a $200 transfer tax on the surviving categories.
In 1934, $200 was an enormous sum of money. A new car cost around $600. The tax was not incidental to the law’s purpose. It was the mechanism. The theory was that ordinary citizens wouldn’t pay the equivalent of a third of a car’s purchase price to own a short-barreled shotgun, and so the law would achieve prohibition through taxation without technically banning anything. The Supreme Court, in the handful of cases that addressed the NFA directly in the pre-constitutional-text-and-history era, accepted that rationale. The federal government has taxing authority. A tax that incidentally discourages behavior is different from an outright ban. Therefore, the NFA is constitutional.
That logic was always shaky, and it got shakier as inflation eroded the $200 to near meaninglessness. By 2025, $200 was less than the cost of the cheapest suppressors on the market. The tax that was designed to be prohibitive had become a minor inconvenience. But the government kept collecting it and kept treating it as the constitutional anchor for everything else: the registration requirement, the fingerprinting, the photography, the months-long wait, the felony penalties for technical violations.
Congress removed that anchor on July 4th. The tax is gone. The question now in federal courts is what remains.
The cases building on the zeroed-out tax
Multiple lawsuits were filed in anticipation of and immediately following the January 1st effective date, all making the same core argument: if the only constitutional justification for the NFA was Congress’s taxing power, and the tax is now $0, then the remaining regulatory apparatus has no valid constitutional basis.
Roberts v. ATF, filed February 26, 2026, in the Eastern District of Kentucky, brings together Buckeye Firearms Association, the American Suppressor Association Foundation, the Center for Human Liberty, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and several individual plaintiffs. The complaint argues that suppressors and SBRs are “bearable arms” protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment under the Bruen framework, that the registration requirements violate that protection, and that eliminating the tax removes the only power under Article I that ever justified the law.
Brown v. ATF, filed in August 2025 in the Eastern District of Missouri, is further along in litigation. On March 24, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen R. Clark ordered supplemental briefing on both threshold and constitutional questions, which signals that the court is taking the challenge seriously rather than dismissing it on procedural grounds.
Jensen v. ATF, filed in October 2025 in the Northern District of Texas, presents similar arguments. The Northern District of Texas is where the Fifth Circuit’s post-Bruen Second Amendment jurisprudence is most developed, which makes it a significant forum.
The DOJ’s response in these cases has been revealing. Rather than defending the NFA on taxing power grounds, Bondi’s department has pivoted to arguing that the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause independently authorize the registration requirements even without a tax. Gun Owners of America called this the “ultimate betrayal” of the Second Amendment, and they are not wrong that it is a remarkable position for a Republican administration to take. The DOJ is essentially arguing that the government can maintain a federal registry of law-abiding gun owners as a regulation of interstate commerce, with or without any tax at all.
That argument, if it succeeds in court, would mean the NFA survives the tax elimination entirely intact. I don’t think it will succeed under Bruen, and here’s why.
The Bruen argument that the NFA cannot survive
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, decided in 2022, fundamentally changed the analytical framework for Second Amendment challenges. Under the old two-step means-ends balancing test, courts could weigh the government’s interest in public safety against the burden on the right and find the regulation justified. Under Bruen, that is no longer the test. The government must now demonstrate that any regulation is consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation at the time of the founding.
Suppressors were invented in 1909 by Hiram Percy Maxim. Short-barreled rifles and shotguns have existed throughout American firearms history. None of these items were regulated in any way by the federal government until the NFA in 1934. There is no founding-era tradition of federal registration requirements, transfer taxes, or wait times for these categories of firearms. The NFA simply did not exist at the founding, and there is no analogous historical regulation that would satisfy the Bruen test.
The government’s counterargument will be that suppressors and SBRs are “dangerous and unusual weapons” that fall outside Second Amendment protection under the Heller exception. That argument requires demonstrating that these items are not in common use for lawful purposes. There are currently over 1.1 million registered suppressors in the United States, and that number will grow substantially now that the $200 tax no longer acts as a deterrent. SBRs are similarly widespread. Items owned by millions of Americans for lawful purposes are, by any reasonable definition, in common use.
The doctrinal path to dismantling the NFA registration scheme is cleaner now than it has ever been. The tax elimination did not just save gun owners $200. It stripped out the constitutional foundation the government has relied on for ninety-one years.
Why this law was always incoherent
I want to take a minute to talk about the substantive absurdity of what the NFA regulates, because I think a lot of people outside the firearms community accept the premise that this stuff should be tightly controlled without ever examining whether there is any rational basis for the specific categories.
A pistol with a barrel length of 16 inches is a completely ordinary, unregulated firearm. Cut the barrel to 15 inches and you have a short-barreled rifle requiring NFA registration, a tax stamp that until yesterday cost $200, fingerprints, photographs, and a months-long federal approval process. The firearm itself is functionally identical. The chamber, action, magazine, and projectile are unchanged. The regulatory category turns entirely on a measurement that has nothing to do with lethality or suitability for criminal use.
Suppressors are even harder to defend as a special category. The device reduces the sound of a gunshot from approximately 160 decibels to approximately 130 decibels. It does not make a gunshot inaudible or undetectable. OSHA considers sustained exposure to anything above 90 decibels potentially damaging. A suppressed gunshot, at 130 decibels, is still louder than most industrial equipment. The movie trope of a silenced gun making a quiet puff sound is fiction. These are hearing protection devices. They protect shooters from occupational noise exposure.
In the United Kingdom, suppressors are actively encouraged for hunting. In New Zealand and Finland, they are sold over the counter without special licensing. In much of Europe, where overall gun ownership is tightly restricted, the suppressor itself is considered a safety accessory rather than a dangerous weapon. The United States treats it as a controlled item requiring federal registration because legislators in 1934 worried that police would not be able to hear gunshots if suppressors became widespread. That concern has guided federal law for ninety-one years.
The NFA is a law built on a momentary political panic in 1934, structured around a tax mechanism that has been inflated away to irrelevance, and maintained by institutional inertia and the kind of cultural fear about firearms that treats the silhouette of a gun as inherently menacing regardless of what the item actually does. It does not make anyone safer. It does not prevent criminal use of the regulated items, since criminals do not file ATF Form 4s. It is bureaucratic friction imposed exclusively on law-abiding gun owners.
What is still broken and what we do now
I want to be clear about what today is not. The registration requirement is still there. You still need to submit ATF Form 4, provide fingerprints, submit photographs, and wait for approval. Processing times have improved dramatically with electronic filing, down to an average of 10 to 14 days for individual eForm 4 submissions as of early 2026 compared to the six-to-twelve-month waits of prior years. That is a genuine improvement in bureaucratic efficiency. It does not change the constitutional problem, which is that a right being made contingent on government approval after a waiting period and identity documentation is still an infringement.
The Bondi DOJ’s decision to defend the registry under Commerce Clause grounds is a problem that needs to be named directly. Bondi, as Florida Attorney General, supported AR-15 bans, open carry bans, and age-based handgun purchase restrictions. Her record as a Second Amendment defender is thin, and her department’s current posture in NFA litigation confirms that her appointment was a mistake from a gun rights perspective regardless of her other qualifications. Trump delivered the most significant pro-2A legislative win in my lifetime by getting the NFA tax zeroed out in the Big Beautiful Bill. He did not deliver an AG who would let that win matter.
Congress made its intent clear in November when thirty House members told Bondi in writing that the goal was full NFA repeal. The DOJ ignored that. The courts are where this goes next.
The cases now in federal court have a real chance. The tax elimination has removed the only argument that kept this law constitutionally defensible under pre-Bruen doctrine, and Bruen itself sets a standard that the NFA’s registration scheme cannot meet on the merits. We have knocked out the foundation. The question is how long it takes the structure above it to fall.
Today is the first real forward movement on the NFA in my lifetime and in yours. Celebrate what it is. Keep fighting for what it isn’t yet.
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