On March 9, 2026, a cert petition was filed at the United States Supreme Court in Peterson v. United States, No. 25-1076, and it is asking the justices to do something the Court has never done: directly confront the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act’s registration-and-tax regime for suppressors. I have been following this case from the beginning, and I want to walk you through exactly what happened in the Fifth Circuit, why that court got the law wrong twice, and why this petition deserves serious consideration at One First Street.
From a Louisiana Bedroom Safe to the Steps of the Supreme Court
George Peterson is the proprietor of PDW Solutions, LLC, a firearm business he ran partly out of his home in Louisiana. In the summer of 2022, ATF agents executed a search warrant. Inside a safe in Peterson’s bedroom closet, agents found a suppressor Peterson had assembled himself from commercially available components and a kit. The suppressor was in working condition. It had no serial number. It was not registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, as 26 U.S.C. § 5841 requires for all NFA-regulated items.
Peterson was indicted under 26 U.S.C. §§ 5861(d) and 5871 — the NFA’s possession and penalty provisions — for owning an unregistered NFA item. He moved to dismiss on Second Amendment grounds, arguing the NFA’s registration framework is unconstitutional under Heller and Bruen. The district court denied the motion. Peterson appealed, and the case reached a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit on docket No. 24-30043.
The original panel opinion, issued in February 2025, was deeply flawed: the court held that suppressors are not protected “arms” under the Second Amendment at all, categorically reading them out of constitutional protection. The opinion was so poorly reasoned that the Fifth Circuit withdrew it in June 2025. On December 9, 2025, a substituted opinion was issued. The court retreated from its initial position, this time assuming — without deciding — that suppressors do qualify as protected arms. But then it upheld the NFA anyway. That is the reasoning the cert petition now challenges.
The Fifth Circuit’s Licensing Analogy Is a Category Error
The December 2025 substituted opinion upheld the NFA by classifying it as a “shall-issue licensing regime” — attempting to piggyback on language in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), where the Supreme Court observed that shall-issue carry-licensing schemes are “presumptively lawful.” The Fifth Circuit’s logic: since the ATF must grant an NFA registration to any applicant who passes a background check and pays the $200 tax stamp, the whole scheme resembles a shall-issue licensing system, and under Bruen that is apparently fine.
This is a category error of the first order, and I cannot overstate how wrong it is. Shall-issue carry permitting is a regulation of people — it decides who may exercise the right to bear arms in public. The NFA’s registration and tax regime is a regulation of specific arms — it decides which items may be possessed at all, conditioning lawful possession on payment of a special federal tax and entry into a permanent government registry. These are two entirely different questions.
Bruen’s observation about shall-issue licensing was narrow and contextual: the Court was addressing whether states could impose a “may-issue” standard requiring applicants to show special need. The Court’s passing reference to the historical legitimacy of shall-issue carry permitting for people says nothing about whether the government may require per-arm registration, impose a targeted tax on a specific class of protected weapons, or make unregistered possession a felony. The Fifth Circuit stretched a narrow Bruen footnote into a blank check for the NFA, and that reasoning cannot stand under serious scrutiny.
What the Cert Petition Argues
The cert petition is direct and strong. First, suppressors plainly qualify as “arms” under District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008): they are bearable instruments that facilitate the constitutionally protected defense of home and self. Text covers them. History — the pre-1934 decades during which suppressors were sold freely through hardware stores and Sears catalogs — confirms it. Second, there is no historical tradition of requiring per-arm registration of protected weapons or imposing special taxes on the exercise of a constitutional right. The NFA dates to 1934, not 1791. Third, the $200 registration tax is not a neutral revenue measure; it is a targeted levy on the exercise of a specific constitutional right, and the government has no authority to price-ration constitutional rights through punitive taxation.
The Firearms Policy Coalition has backed Peterson’s challenge throughout this litigation, and the clean factual record — a single suppressor, a single charge, a direct constitutional challenge — gives the Supreme Court a workable vehicle for resolving the question once and for all.
Why This Petition Has Legs
My read is that this cert petition is strong. The Fifth Circuit’s decision creates a serious methodological problem for the post-Bruen world. If the “shall-issue” analogy can be bootstrapped into constitutional cover for any NFA item that a licensed applicant can obtain by paying a fee and clearing a background check, then the government can extend that logic to every class of protected arm. Short-barrel rifles, suppressors, and anything else on the NFA’s list becomes constitutionally safe as long as ATF runs an objective-criteria approval process. That reasoning swallows Bruen’s historical-tradition framework whole.
The Supreme Court does not take every case. But it takes cases where a circuit court has produced a published opinion that threatens to distort the entire analytical framework the Court built in Bruen. The Fifth Circuit’s December 2025 opinion does exactly that. I am watching this petition closely, and so should you.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.