The Trump administration let a midnight deadline pass without filing an appeal of a federal court ruling that struck down key provisions of the National Firearms Act, and for the first time in 92 years, Americans began legally acquiring firearm suppressors without federal registration.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican and gun store owner who engineered the legislative strategy behind the ruling, called it the “greatest restoration” of Second Amendment rights in almost a century. Gun control advocates called it a failure of government. And the Department of Justice, for its part, said it “respects Americans’ Second Amendment rights” and is “currently assessing the impact of the court’s ruling.”
What actually happened is straightforward, and consequential. A federal judge examined a 1934 law, noticed Congress had pulled the tax out from under it, and concluded the regulatory structure it supported could no longer stand.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 imposed a $200 tax on the transfer and manufacture of suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and certain other firearms. That tax justified an elaborate federal registration and approval regime, fingerprinting, ATF paperwork, background checks layered on top of standard checks, and wait times that could stretch for months.
Last year, Republicans included a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that reduced that $200 tax to $0. The provision, which Clyde led, took effect January 1, 2026, according to the Washington Examiner. But Congress left the registration paperwork intact, creating a legal contradiction that gun rights groups immediately exploited.
Their argument was elegant in its simplicity: Congress built the NFA’s regulatory power on its constitutional taxing authority. Remove the tax, and the constitutional foundation crumbles. The registration requirement becomes an orphan, a federal mandate with no Article I justification.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of Texas agreed. In a 66-page opinion, he ruled that the NFA’s registration and permitting requirements for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns could no longer be enforced.
As Judge Hendrix wrote in his ruling, reported by the Associated Press: “No longer can the challenged NFA provisions be justified, as they have been for nearly 90 years, under Congress’s taxing power.”
The case, Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, did not affect machine guns or destructive devices, which still carry the $200 tax. And the permanent injunction is limited in scope, applying to named plaintiffs, their members and customers, and 15 plaintiff states, not the entire country.
But the precedent it sets reaches far beyond the named parties. The Second Amendment Foundation said the ruling “will set a precedent we can now argue in courts across the country to allow Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights without fear of being placed on some government registry.”
The ruling alone was significant. The Trump administration’s response made it historic.
Clyde and 47 Republican lawmakers had sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche urging the DOJ not to appeal. The letter argued that fighting the ruling would “prolong regulatory uncertainty for law-abiding gun owners and businesses and would consume DOJ resources defending a position that this Congress and now a federal district court has said cannot stand.”
The administration listened. When the appeal deadline arrived at midnight Thursday, the DOJ had filed nothing. Just The News reported that Clyde confirmed receiving word from the Trump administration that the DOJ would not appeal.
The decision carries a legal nuance worth noting. Newsmax reported that the Justice Department technically still has 52 days to file an appeal, meaning the legal battle is not necessarily over. But by declining to seek an immediate stay or file by the initial deadline, the administration allowed the ruling to take effect, and gun owners moved fast.
The real-world consequences arrived within hours. On August 13, Silencer Shop conducted what it described as the first unregistered suppressor transfer since 1934. The New York Post reported that Brandon Herrera and Texas state Rep. Wes Virdell acquired suppressors from Silencer Shop in Leander, Texas, the first lawful transfers without NFA registration in 92 years.
Aidan Johnston, Gun Owners of America’s director of federal affairs, put it plainly: “This is the first time in 92 years that any gun owner has been able to do this.”
Clyde, who founded Clyde Armory in Georgia before entering Congress, framed the victory in constitutional terms that go beyond suppressors and short-barreled rifles. His argument is that taxing a constitutional right is a mechanism for destroying it, and that the NFA’s registration regime was always, at bottom, a tax enforcement tool.
“If you can tax something legitimately, then you can actually destroy it through increased taxation. You might, quote, ‘have a right on paper,’ but you don’t really have a right because you can’t afford the right. Is that really a right? It’s not.”
The logic tracks a principle conservatives have long applied to other rights. Poll taxes were struck down because conditioning a constitutional right on payment guts the right itself. Clyde applied the same reasoning to the Second Amendment.
“So here we are removing the taxation on a constitutional right from a bill that was passed in 1934. And once you remove the tax aspect of it, then you remove the constitutionality of the registration aspect.”
He went further, placing the Second Amendment at the center of the entire constitutional order. The right to keep and bear arms, Clyde argued, is “the teeth behind the Constitution”, the guarantee that protects every other guarantee.
This ruling arrives amid a broader pattern of federal courts reassessing long-standing firearms restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, which required gun laws to be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.
Not everyone celebrated. Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, issued a sharp statement condemning the administration’s inaction.
“Today, our government is failing us. At midnight, uniquely lethal weapons and devices, including silencers, short-barreled rifles, and shotguns, were deregulated for the first time in nearly a century.”
Brown added that “the gun industry and silencer dealers are celebrating, while Americans are left less safe.”
The characterization is worth examining. Standard background checks and state laws remain in effect, the ruling eliminated the additional NFA layer of federal fingerprinting, registration, and ATF approval. Suppressors do not silence a firearm the way Hollywood depicts; they reduce the sound of a gunshot by roughly 30 decibels, bringing it from hearing-damage levels to merely very loud. The NFA’s regulatory burden on these items has long struck gun owners as disproportionate to any public safety benefit.
Courts across the country have been striking down firearms restrictions with increasing frequency, from semiautomatic rifle bans to state-level AR-15 prohibitions. The Supreme Court itself unanimously struck down a federal gun ban for marijuana users, signaling that the judiciary is taking a harder look at firearms regulations that lack firm constitutional grounding.
The ruling’s immediate scope is limited. It applies to the parties in the lawsuit and the 15 plaintiff states, not to every gun owner in every state. Gun owners outside that scope still face NFA requirements until additional litigation or legislation changes the picture.
But the constitutional logic of Judge Hendrix’s opinion is available to any court in any circuit. Congress wrote a regulatory scheme that depended entirely on a tax. Then Congress killed the tax. The judge, as the Washington Examiner’s Jay Rogers put it, “finally did the arithmetic.”
Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, framed the stakes in broader terms: “The era of federal registration for constitutionally protected arms must end.”
Whether that era ends nationwide depends on how other courts and future administrations handle the precedent. The DOJ’s 52-day window to appeal remains technically open. And state-level legal battles over firearms restrictions continue to work through the courts.
But the direction is clear. Congress removed the tax. A federal judge removed the registration requirement it supported. And the Trump administration chose not to stand in the way.
For 92 years, the federal government told Americans they needed its permission, and its paperwork, and its fingerprints, and its months-long wait, to exercise a right the Constitution already guaranteed. A gun store owner from Georgia found the lever that unwound the whole thing. Sometimes the simplest constitutional arguments are the ones that took the longest to make.
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