The US Department of Justice allowed the Court’s appeal deadline to pass, against the National Firearms Act regarding registration requirements for suppressors and short-barreled firearms.
At exactly midnight, the DOJ allowed its window to appeal last week’s ruling in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF to pass, marking a landmark win for America and its Second Amendment supporters.
The case, which was handled in the Northern District of Texas, claimed that Congress exceeded its constitutional power when applying portions of the National Firearms Act to untaxed firearms. The judge ruled in favor of America and stayed the order for a week to allow appeals, which were not filed by the midnight deadline.
“The challenged NFA provisions are unconstitutional,” Judge James Wesley Hendrix noted in his ruling. 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.”
Congress previously relied on its taxing authority to pass the National Firearms Act (NFA) back in 1934, which established a then-huge $200 fee to transfer or make certain firearms. The law also required the registration of all NFA firearms with the US Secretary of the Treasury.
The law encompassed shotguns and rifles having barrels less than 18 inches in length, certain firearms described as “any other weapons,” machine guns, and firearm mufflers and silencers. This ruling does not apply to fully automatic machine guns and any other weapons (AOW), which will continue to be regulated.
But last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the tax for those items. The guns provision was first requested in the House by Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Republican gun store owner who had initially opposed the larger tax package.
Once the tax was nixed with the bill last year, it opened the door for the recent Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF ruling.
Rep. Clyde, along with various other governmental officials, signed a letter in support of the ruling, stating:
“When the DOJ defends unconstitutional gun regulations, then the ATF becomes weaponized against law-abiding Americans and the government betrays its founding purpose. Restoring the Second Amendment is not merely a policy matter — it is a fulfillment of this nation’s oldest and most sacred promise to its people.”
While this ruling applies on a national scale, it is not yet adopted unilaterally at the state level. The letter calls on the DOJ to apply the ruling nationwide — but for now, state laws must be followed.
“Immediate application of the ruling nationwide is necessary to avoid the untenable alternative in the interim: a split enforcement regime in which the DOJ applies these requirements to one gun owner while declining to apply them to his neighbor, solely because one person happens to be a customer of Silencer Shop or a member of Gun Owners of America. Administering that kind of regime would require the DOJ and ATF to maintain two parallel tracks for identical conduct depending on the applicant’s affiliations. That is not a workable or defensible way to administer a national regulatory program, even for the period before a rule can be finalized.”