It might seem counterintuitive, but when Congress eliminated the $200 registration fee under the 1934 National Firearms Act for the registration of suppressors and short-barreled rifles, it rendered the law unconstitutional. So held Judge Jimmy Hendrix*, and the government has not as yet appealed.
House Republicans added a provision eliminating the $200 tax on suppressors and short-barreled rifles when they passed Mr. Trump’s major spending bill last year.
That change triggered the downfall of the law, which had for 92 years required buyers of restricted arms to submit their fingerprints and seek A.T.F. approval. Gun advocacy groups quickly filed several lawsuits seeking to further weaken the law, arguing that the registration process was unconstitutional without the tax component.
Judge Hendrix agreed with that argument, ruling in a 66-page order that because the law no longer generated revenue, “its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power” given to Congress in Article 1 of the Constitution.
One might presume that the power to tax was secondary to the prohibition against impairment of a fundamental constitutional right, but when it came to silencers and short-barreled shotguns, not so much. Perhaps it was because the law had been on the books for such a long time, having been enacted following the heady times of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, where people were more concerned about gangsters shooting up the streets than Eliot Ness knocking down their doors. And even the now-venerated Justice Nino Scalia inserted the inexplicable errant paragraph in Heller to cover such ancillary devices as silencers.
Notably, the $200 registration fee, a tax as the courts characterized it that justified the impairment of a constitutional right in the post-Heller days, was no longer the burden it was originally meant to be.
Millions of N.F.A. restricted guns and suppressors were sold every year under the registration process, which is managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The $200 tax was designed to be prohibitively expensive in 1934 dollars, but by 2026 amounted to a fraction of the cost of a modern firearm or suppressor.
Nonetheless, the Big Beautiful Bill, so named because of Trump’s limited vocabulary and belief that anyone who supported him would be enthralled by his mad naming skills, eliminated the minimal $200 tax on silencers and short-barreled guns anyway. It’s unlikely that anyone considered that the elimination of the tax would take down the law, but now that it’s happened, the Department of Trump Justice has a decision to make, whether to appeal or let it go.
The Justice Department did not explain why it did not immediately appeal the ruling. In an unsigned statement to The New York Times hours before the midnight deadline, the Justice Department said that it “respects Americans’ Second Amendment rights and is currently assessing the impact of the court’s ruling.”
It was a retreat by the Trump administration, which had argued after Mr. Trump’s law was passed last year that Congress still had the authority to restrict particularly dangerous and easily concealable weapons. The government’s move to forgo a stay of the ruling — or issue any public statement on the issue — came after gun rights groups and dozens of Republican lawmakers publicly pressured Todd Blanche, the attorney general, to allow the ruling to stand.
The impact of silencers being available for sale is quite obvious. For people inclined toward nefarious use of a weapon that otherwise makes a fairly loud noise, this would enable them to use a gun for their dirty deeds without being so easily detected. There are, of course, legitimate uses for suppressors, such as the protection of hearing and brain injury. The legitimate need for more easily concealable rifles and shotguns is a little harder to find, although no doubt some people will come up with some explanation for why they serve some acceptable purpose beyond being concealed under raincoats.
No doubt law-abiding gun users and enthusiasts will argue that it’s not the silencers or short-barreled guns that commit crimes, but their users. As no stay has been sought nor notice of appeal filed, it seems highly unlikely that the DoJ will fight Judge Hendrix’s sound if troubling ruling. It would thus appear that these long-held NFA restrictions are now gone for good. They say silence is golden. It looks like we’ll find out.
*The ruling by Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas does not apply universally, and the law remains in effect in states like California, New York and Washington, D.C.