Federal Court Strikes Down NFA Registration for Suppressors

American Suppressor Association  •  August 5, 2026

On August 5, 2026, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the National Firearms Act's registration scheme is unconstitutional as applied to suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and any other weapons — because Congress zeroed out the tax those registration requirements were built to collect. The American Suppressor Association helped make both halves of that sentence happen.

This is the most consequential NFA ruling in ninety years. Here is what the court actually held, what ASA did to get us here, what the decision does and, just as importantly, what it does not do.

What the Court Ruled

U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF — the consolidated case that included the ASA-backed Jensen v. ATF — and permanently enjoined ATF and DOJ from enforcing the NFA's core registration provisions against the plaintiffs as to untaxed firearms.

The reasoning is straightforward, and it is the argument ASA and its partners have made since the day the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed:

1. Congress enacted the NFA in 1934 under one power and one power only — the power to “lay and collect Taxes.” The Supreme Court blessed it on exactly that basis in Sonzinsky v. United States (1937), calling the registration provisions supportable as an aid to a revenue purpose.
2. The essential feature of any tax is that it raises revenue. That principle comes from the Supreme Court's own NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) decision.
3. As of January 1, 2026, the making and transfer taxes on suppressors, SBRs, SBSs, and AOWs are $0. They raise no revenue.
4. A registration regime that exists to help collect a tax that no longer exists cannot be sustained under the taxing power. There is no revenue left to aid.

The government tried three escape routes. The court closed all three.

The special occupational tax argument failed.

DOJ argued the registration provisions still support collection of the Special Occupational Tax (SOT) on importers, manufacturers, and dealers. The court rejected it on text, structure, and precedent: the SOT has its own separate registration scheme in 26 U.S.C. § 5802, which nobody challenged. The court also did the math on ATF's own declarations. The vast majority of untaxed NFA firearms are already made and transferred by SOT-paying licensees, and of roughly 2.2 million NFA transfers in 2025, at most 691 applications (about 0.03%) were disapproved over any SOT issue. That is not a scheme “plainly adapted” to collecting the occupational tax.

The Necessary and Proper Clause argument failed.

The court called out the logical endpoint of the government's theory using a hypothetical straight from the plaintiffs' briefing: if Congress imposed a $1 annual occupational tax on grocers, could it then require fingerprints, photographs, and federal registration from anyone who wanted to possess broccoli, just to make sure nobody was evading the grocer tax? If that is absurd for produce, it is no less absurd for constitutionally protected arms.

The Commerce Clause argument failed.

This is the holding with the longest reach. The court found that Congress never invoked its commerce power when it wrote the NFA, and the government cannot retroactively borrow a power Congress never used. The statute sits in Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code. Its subchapter is literally titled “Taxes.” It contains no interstate-commerce jurisdictional hook, unlike the Gun Control Act, which Congress deliberately built on the commerce power and placed in Title 18. And where Congress did want to reach interstate commerce inside the NFA (in § 5861(j) and (k)) it said so expressly. Those two subsections were not challenged.

The court also dispatched United States v. Ardoin, the 1994 Fifth Circuit case the government leaned on for the proposition that the NFA could rest on the commerce power. The court held that the NFA's “constitutional bedrock” is the taxing power rather than the commerce power.

An important note: because the plaintiffs won outright on enumerated powers, the court did not reach the Second Amendment. At the plaintiffs' invitation, those claims were dismissed without prejudice as abandoned. A deliberate choice, since the injunction delivers everything a Second Amendment win would have delivered, without asking an appellate court to referee a constitutional question it did not need to answer.

What Parts of the NFA are Included

For the plaintiffs and, where applicable, their agencies, political subdivisions, members, and customers, current and future, ATF and DOJ are permanently barred from enforcing the following as to untaxed firearms:

• 26 U.S.C. § 5812(a)–(b)Transfer application and approval requirements (the Form 4)
• 26 U.S.C. § 5822Making application and approval requirements (the Form 1)
• 26 U.S.C. § 5841(a)–(c), (e)The National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record and proof-of-registration duty
• 26 U.S.C. § 5861(b)–(f)The criminal prohibitions on receiving, possessing, transferring, or making outside the scheme
• 27 C.F.R. § 479.62(a)–(d)Form 1 implementing regulations
• 27 C.F.R. § 479.84(a)–(d)Form 4 implementing regulations

Two additional provisions were enjoined only as to the Jensen plaintiffs — the ASA-backed side of the consolidated case — because only they challenged them:

• 26 U.S.C. § 5842(b)The marking/serialization requirement for makers
• 26 U.S.C. § 5861(i)The prohibition on possessing an unmarked firearm

How We Got Here: ASA Led the Fight to Zero the Tax

This ruling could not have happened without the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Full stop.

For more than a decade, ASA's long-term federal goal has been the removal of suppressors from the NFA entirely through the Hearing Protection Act. In 2025, working the reconciliation process rather than the ordinary legislative one, ASA led a coalition of Second Amendment organizations and industry partners in a coordinated push to strip the NFA's making and transfer taxes on suppressors down to zero. That effort survived a brutal procedural gauntlet in the Senate known as the “Byrd Rule” and landed in the final bill.

President Trump signed H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), on July 4, 2025. Section 70436 set the making and transfer tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and AOWs to $0, effective January 1, 2026. Machineguns and destructive devices kept their $200 tax. The $500 and $1,000 special occupational taxes on importers, manufacturers, and dealers were untouched.

At the time, plenty of commentators framed the win purely as a consumer savings story — $200 back in your pocket. ASA understood it as something else: the removal of the single constitutional load-bearing wall holding up the entire registration regime for those four categories of firearms. Congress did not repeal the registry. Congress did something more useful. It knocked out the justification for it.

A judge has now said exactly that, in writing, not in a temporary injunction, but in a summary judgment in favor of law-abiding Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights!

ASA's Role in the Litigation: Jensen v. ATF

Zeroing the tax was step one. Step two was making sure someone actually forced the courts to confront what that meant.

On October 9, 2025, a coalition of four leading gun rights organizations — the American Suppressor Association, the National Rifle Association, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Firearms Policy Coalition — announced the filing of a joint federal lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas challenging the constitutionality of the NFA as applied to untaxed firearms. That case, Jensen v. ATF, was filed in the Amarillo Division on behalf of three individual Texas firearms owners, a Texas FFL/SOT dealer, and three organizational plaintiffs suing on behalf of their members (ASA was not named in the suit due to the fact ASA and the ASA Foundation were directly named in two other NFA-challenges in Missouri and Kentucky. Those cases are ongoing.)

The American Suppressor Association Foundation, ASA's 501(c)(3) educational arm, backed the litigation as part of its ongoing pro-suppressor legal program — the same program funding Brown v. ATF, Roberts v. ATF, Anderson v. Raoul in Illinois, and Padua v. Platkin in New Jersey.

Jensen was later transferred to the San Angelo Division under the first-to-file rule and consolidated with Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, which had been filed on July 4, 2025 — the same day the President signed the OBBB. The court then set both cases for decision on cross-motions for summary judgment and heard oral arguments from counsel for both plaintiff groups on July 7, 2026.

Where the Jensen briefing shows up in the opinion

Three things are worth noting about what the ASA-backed side contributed.

• The Ardoin problem was ours to solve. The Jensen complaint anticipated the government's central Fifth Circuit precedent in its very first footnote and laid out four independent reasons Ardoin does not control: it was a machinegun case, the tax there was “preserved but unused” rather than zeroed, the commerce language was dicta (“said in passing” — referring to a judge's comments or opinions in a court case that are not needed to decide the outcome), and it predated Lopez. The court's opinion works through those same four grounds at length before concluding Ardoin does not bind it.
• The marking provisions were ours alone. Sections 5842(b) and 5861(i) — serialization and the ban on possessing an unmarked firearm — were challenged only by the Jensen plaintiffs. Only the Jensen plaintiffs got relief from them. For anyone who wants to build their own suppressor, that is not a footnote. That is the whole point.
• The remedy was ours to get right. Jensen deliberately requested party-specific relief rather than a universal injunction. After the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, that was the correct read of what a district court can actually award — and it kept the case clean and helps protect the ruling from being overturned on procedural grounds. The court denied the universal injunction sought on the other side of the consolidated case, exactly as CASA required.

ASA and our coalition partners accomplished both halves of the job: change the tax on suppressors, then take it to court to decide what the change means.

What This Ruling Does Not Do

What Happens Next

• The seven-day stay runs from entry of judgment on August 5, 2026.
• The government is likely to seek relief in the Fifth Circuit, which may include a motion to stay the injunction pending appeal.
• Parallel NFA challenges continue in Missouri and Kentucky. A circuit split, or a clean Fifth Circuit affirmance, is what puts this in front of the Supreme Court.
• ASA will continue pushing the Hearing Protection Act. A court ruling that the registry lacks a constitutional basis for untaxed firearms is a powerful argument on Capitol Hill, but a statute is more durable than an injunction, and Congress is where this ends permanently.

The court said it plainly: efforts to render the NFA constitutional must come from Congress, not the courts. We agree. We have been saying it for years.

ASA's Take

For ninety-two years, American suppressor owners have paid a tax designed to price hearing protection out of existence — and submitted fingerprints, photographs, and home addresses to a federal registry just to collect that tax. In 2025, ASA and its coalition partners took the tax to zero. In 2026, a federal court held that the registry that existed to collect it cannot stand on its own.

That is not luck. That is strategy, executed in sequence, over years, by an organization that was created for the sole purpose of making it happen.

The fight is not finished. There is an appeal likely coming, state bans still standing in eight states, and a Hearing Protection Act still sitting in Congress.

But on August 5, 2026, for the first time since 1934, a federal court looked at the NFA's registration scheme for suppressors and said the quiet part out loud: there is no constitutional basis left for it.

If you want to see this through, join ASA or support the ASA Foundation. Legislative wins and courtroom wins are not without cost, and both of them started with members who decided this was worth funding.

Frequently Asked Questions

Want to dig deeper?

• Memorandum Opinion and Order (Dkt. 136) Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, No. 6:25-cv-00056-H (N.D. Tex. Aug. 5, 2026)
• Final Judgment (Dkt. 137) Same case, entered August 5, 2026
• Jensen v. ATF — Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief Filed October 9, 2025 (No. 2:25-cv-00223, N.D. Tex., Amarillo Division)
• Jensen v. ATF — Memorandum in Support of Motion for Summary Judgment Filed November 1, 2025
• One Big Beautiful Bill Act Pub. L. No. 119-21, § 70436, 139 Stat. 72 (2025)
• ASA-F case page: Texas NFA Challenge Full document set, case status, and oral argument audio

The American Suppressor Association is the unified voice of the suppressor industry. This article is provided for general educational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney regarding your specific circumstances.