On August 5, 2026, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, San Angelo Division, held that the National Firearms Act’s core registration and regulatory provisions are unconstitutional as applied to suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns. The ruling came in Silencer Shop Foundation v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, No. 6:25-CV-056-H, consolidated with Jensen v. ATF, No. 6:26-CV-227. Judge James Wesley Hendrix, appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Donald J. Trump, reached that result without invoking the Second Amendment at all. He needed only Article I.
A Statute Without a Tax Has No Constitutional Home
The NFA has survived for ninety years for one reason: it was written, and litigated, as a tax. Congress enacted it in 1934 under its Article I, Section 8 power to lay and collect taxes, requiring a payment before anyone could transfer or make a covered firearm. Everything else in the statute — fingerprinting, photographs, background checks, registration — existed to enforce collection of that tax. The Supreme Court blessed this architecture in Sonzinsky v. United States, 300 U.S. 506 (1937), upholding the NFA’s dealer tax as a facially valid revenue measure notwithstanding its obvious regulatory purpose.
That architecture depended on one fact that no longer exists. In 2025, Congress passed the reconciliation act popularly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Pub. L. No. 119-21, zeroing out the NFA’s making and transfer taxes on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and a defined category of other weapons, effective for the tax year beginning January 1, 2026. Judge Hendrix’s opinion states the consequence plainly:
“Because today’s NFA does not generate any revenue from untaxed firearms, its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power. And there is no sign in the NFA’s text, structure, or statutory history that Congress invoked any other power in crafting the NFA provisions at issue. Thus, the regulatory provisions must be enjoined as unconstitutional because they exceed Congress’s enumerated powers.”
That is the whole case in three sentences. A regulatory scheme built entirely on the taxing power cannot survive once the tax is gone, and a court may not manufacture a Commerce Clause justification Congress never asserted.
A Win for the Second Amendment That Isn’t a Second Amendment Case
The plaintiffs pleaded a Second Amendment claim alongside the Article I claim, then made a deliberate strategic choice: they asked the court to resolve the case on enumerated-powers grounds alone. Judge Hendrix obliged. As he put it, “the court agrees on the first point and need not reach the second.” I have long argued that Second Amendment litigation should not be fought exclusively on Second Amendment terrain — separation-of-powers doctrine, standing, and the structural limits on Congress are just as often the better vehicle, and this case proves it. A statute can fall without a single word being said about the right to keep and bear arms, so long as the power to enact it was never there to begin with.
Who Actually Benefits — and Why Article III Says So
The remedy here is a permanent injunction, not a nationwide one, and the distinction matters. Article III limits federal courts to deciding the case or controversy of the parties actually before them, and the Supreme Court reaffirmed that limit in Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831 (2025), holding that federal courts lack power to issue universal injunctions reaching non-parties. Under longstanding precedent, an organization that is itself a plaintiff carries its members with it — current and future — because the organization’s own injury and the court’s relief run through it. That is why the litigation coalition here — built on the work of Gun Owners of America, which pressed Congress to zero the tax during reconciliation — matters practically and not merely symbolically. Anyone who is not a member of a plaintiff organization and not a plaintiff individually is, as a matter of Article III, outside the scope of this particular judgment, whatever its persuasive force elsewhere.
Judge Hendrix stayed his own judgment for seven days from entry, giving the Department of Justice a window to seek appellate relief. Whether the government appeals, and on what basis, will determine how far this precedent travels beyond the parties in front of Judge Hendrix’s court. What it has already established is not in doubt: a tax that raises no revenue cannot be defended as a tax, and a regulatory scheme with no remaining constitutional hook cannot be enforced.
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.