92
years the NFA stood
Breaking · United States District Court · N.D. Texas · August 5, 2026
Not narrowed. Not enjoined on a technicality. A United States district judge held that the National Firearms Act’s entire registration machine for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns — the forms, the fingerprints, the registry, the wait, the ten-year felonies — is beyond Congress’s power to enact. The law that has governed these firearms since 1934 just lost its constitutional foundation.
“But to be clear: The challenged NFA provisions are unconstitutional.”
Judge James Wesley Hendrix · slip op. at 3 · verbatim
The NFA was never passed as gun regulation. In 1934 Congress knew it had no general police power over firearms, so it reached for the one power it did have: the power to tax. A $200 stamp — roughly $5,000 in today’s money — that the courts themselves say was “explicitly intended to tax [NFA] weapons out of existence.” Every piece of the machine that followed existed for exactly one stated purpose: collecting that tax. That is the only reason the Supreme Court upheld it in Sonzinsky in 1937.
The load path · 1934–2025 · everything bears on the tax
July 4, 2025. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the NFA’s transfer and making tax to $0 for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and “any other weapons,” effective January 1, 2026. But Congress left the machine running. No tax to collect — and still the same forms, the same fingerprints, the same registry, the same felonies, now collecting nothing.
Gun owners saw the opening immediately. The lawsuit was filed the same day the President signed the bill.
The government’s fallback was the Commerce Clause. The court refused: Congress built the NFA on the taxing power alone in 1934 and never invoked commerce — and the DOJ cannot rewrite the statute’s foundation 92 years later from a courtroom. In the court’s own words, whether the machine can still be justified after the tax is gone: “The answer is no.”
Remove the foundation and the structure cannot stand
“Efforts to render the NFA constitutional must come from Congress, not this Court.”
Judge James Wesley Hendrix · slip op. at 3 · verbatim
Notice that last one. This wasn’t even a Second Amendment ruling. The plaintiffs won so cleanly on Congress’s enumerated powers that the court never had to open the Bruen playbook. The NFA didn’t lose a gun case. It lost a constitutional structure case.
Under Trump v. CASA, no more nationwide injunctions — the court could only protect the parties in front of it. But look at who the parties are. This is one of the largest “party-specific” injunctions you will ever see.
TX · AK · GA · ID · IN · KS · LA · MT · ND · OK · SC · SD · UT · WV · WY
Add that up. Millions of association members, every customer who ever walks into Palmetto State Armory’s orbit, and the law enforcement of fifteen states. “Party-specific” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
One catch before anyone celebrates at the gun counter: the court stayed its own order for seven days — until August 12, 2026 — to give the government a chance to run to the Fifth Circuit.