A federal judge in Texas ruled Wednesday that key parts of the 1934 National Firearms Act are unconstitutional, opening the door to eliminating registration requirements for silencers and short-barreled rifles and shotguns.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee in the Northern District of Texas, said Congress lost its legal basis for the registration and paperwork rules when it zeroed out the $200 transfer tax on those items last year in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“Because today’s NFA does not generate any revenue from untaxed firearms, its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power,” Hendrix wrote in his 66-page opinion in Silencer Shop v. ATF.
The 1934 law relied on Congress’s taxing authority to justify fingerprinting, background checks and a lengthy approval process through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for anyone transferring or making a silencer, short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun. With the tax gone, Hendrix ruled, the regulatory scheme built on top of it has no constitutional footing.
“Thus, the regulatory provisions must be enjoined as unconstitutional because they exceed Congress’s enumerated powers,” he wrote.
Hendrix limited the ruling to the plaintiffs in two consolidated cases, but that group is large. It includes the Firearms Policy Coalition, individual gun owners, commercial firearms manufacturers and retailers, and 15 Republican-led states: Texas, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
West Virginia Attorney General J.B. McCuskey, one of the state plaintiffs, said in a statement that “the federal government has long used its taxing power as a backdoor to impose invasive registration mandates on law-abiding citizens.”
The ruling does not touch machine guns, which fall under separate federal law justified through Congress’s commerce power rather than its taxing power.
Hendrix put a seven-day hold on the ruling to give the government time to appeal. The Trump administration’s Justice Department had defended the NFA in court by arguing it could be upheld under the Commerce Clause instead of the taxing power Congress originally used.
The case originated on July 4, 2025, the same day President Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill into law, when challengers filed suit within hours of the tax elimination taking effect.
