On January 1, the $200 transfer tax on NFA items like suppressors and short-barreled firearms will be zeroed out by a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The NFA’s registration requirement, however, remains in place even though the statute states its a registry of everyone who’s paid their tax.
It’s still unclear how this will work in practice, but a coalition of red states, businesses dealing in NFA items, and 2A groups like Gun Owners of America have filed suit in a federal court in Texas seeking to undo the registration scheme. The DOJ has actively defended the registration requirement, and have been supported by gun control groups like Brady and Everytown in those efforts.
In their latest court filing, the coalition looking to take down the registration mandate argue that the government’s defense of the registry offers up a “stunning theory of federal power” that could impact almost every business in the United States… and their customers.
The Government agrees that the NFA’s firearm registration requirements have always facilitated collection of the statute’s firearm making and transfer taxes. And it agrees that now that the firearm taxes are gone, the firearm registration requirements no longer serve that purpose. So, it invents a new theory. It claims that the firearm registration provisions instead facilitate a separate occupational tax. That defies reality.The firearm registration requirements plainly supported the now-zeroed firearm taxes, while the occupational registration requirements, 26 U.S.C. § 5802, plainly support the occupational tax.
The Government’s counterarguments confirm the firearm registration requirements are not“needful and ‘plainly adapted’ to executing Congress’s” occupational tax. And they reveal a stunning theory of federal power: according to the Government, if it imposes an annual tax on any business, it has the authority to track every customer and good that could ever potentially touch that business with a fingerprint mandate and registration in a federal law-enforcement database as prophylactic measures that in no way support the collection of any actual revenue.That limitless theory is anathema to our constitutional system.
The plaintiffs also argue that the government’s attempt to recast the NFA registration requirement as a lawful exercise under the Commerce Clause is at odds with the long history of the government’s position that the NFA is meant as a crime-fighting measure.
The Government tries to reconceptualize the NFA as an interstate-commerce regulation by selectively quoting a single sentence from United States v. Ardoin, 19 F.3d 177 (5th Cir. 1994). But that case upheld an NFA provision under the taxing power and observed that “the regulation of machineguns could … be upheld under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.” But machineguns, unlike the untaxed firearms at issue here, are subject to a total-market freeze—a unique scheme that courts have used to ground machinegun regulation in the Commerce Clause. Dictum about machineguns cannot salvage the Government’s case.
Nor could the Commerce Clause sustain application of the challenged NFA provisions to intrastate activity. The Government fails to explain why intrastate possession, transfer, and making of untaxed firearms has any connection to interstate commerce. And the reason for that omission is obvious: the purpose of the challenged NFA provisions was never to reach interstate commerce. The Government’s attempt to analogize the NFA to the Controlled Substances Act, at issue in Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005), only crystallizes the problem. The CSA is a comprehensive effort “to control the supply and demand” of an “interstate market.” That is about as commerce-based as it gets and is nothing like the NFA’s crime-control regulations. The Government’s failure to tie the challenged NFA provisions to any interstate-market regulation dooms its case and underscores its unbounded view of federal power.
The DOJ’s defense of the registration requirements also puts the executive branch at odds with the legislative branch of the federal government. Congress had intended for the OBBBA to remove the registration requirement for NFA items no longer subject to a $200 tax, but that language was removed by the Senate parliamentarian as a violation of the Byrd Rule. The DOJ could take the side of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit and allow gun control groups and blue-state AGs to step in and defend the registration requirements, but instead the agency continues to take the lead in fighting to keep the registration requirements in place.
We’ll be talking more about the registry and how it will work come January 1 on today’s Bearing Arms Cam & Company with Knox Williams from the American Suppressor Association. I encourage you to tune in, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for any action from U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix as well. Hendrix, a Trump appointee, has competing motions for summary judgement in front of him, but the government has one more opportunity to reply to the plaintiffs in a brief due on January 7, 2026, so it’s highly unlikely that Hendrix would issue a ruling before then.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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