On August 5, 2026, Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas held in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, consolidated with Jensen v. ATF, that the National Firearms Act’s registration and enforcement apparatus for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns can no longer stand now that Congress has zeroed out the tax those provisions existed to collect. The relief he entered is narrower than the celebration around it suggests: it runs to the plaintiffs and to their customers’ transactions with them and with their commercial members, not to every owner of every NFA item in the country. That ruling is a milestone, not a terminus. The real question is what it takes to get from one Texas judgment to a genuinely nationwide end of NFA registration for these items, including in the deep-blue states that still ban them outright. I have been mapping that road for over a year, and I intend to walk through it here.
One Judgment, Two More Cases Building the Same Record
The Hendrix ruling did not arise in a vacuum, and it will not end the litigation wave by itself. Two sister cases are working through the same taxing-power theory in different circuits. Roberts v. ATF, No. 2:26-cv-00091, filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky before Judge S. Chad Meredith, was brought by T.J. Roberts, several co-plaintiffs, and the American Suppressor Association Foundation, backed by the American Suppressor Association; summary judgment briefing was underway there by late April 2026. Brown v. ATF, No. 4:25-cv-01162, filed in the Eastern District of Missouri before Chief Judge Stephen R. Clark, has been pending since August 2025 and counts the National Rifle Association, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the American Suppressor Association among its plaintiffs. Multiple courts reaching the same conclusion, in different circuits, on the same Article I logic, is what turns one persuasive opinion into a durable body of law that other judges, and eventually appellate courts, cannot easily wave away.
The Appeal Window Is Still Open
Judge Hendrix stayed his own judgment for seven days to let the government seek emergency relief. That stay expired at midnight Central time on August 13, 2026, and the Department of Justice let it lapse without filing a notice of appeal or seeking a further stay. The judgment is therefore in effect today. But that is not the end of the government’s options. Under the federal rules, the United States has sixty days from a final judgment to notice an appeal, which puts the real deadline in early October 2026. Letting the emergency stay lapse tells you the government did not think it could show the kind of immediate, irreparable harm required for emergency relief. It does not tell you the government has abandoned the case. Until that October deadline passes, I am treating this as won at the trial level and still open on appeal, and I would encourage anyone citing this ruling to say precisely that.
From Common Use to a Supreme Court Reaffirmation
Here is the mechanism I have argued connects a federal tax case to state suppressor bans. Once the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025 and effective January 1, 2026, zeroed the $200 tax on these items, prices fell and demand rose. The Hendrix judgment removes the Form 4 registration and fingerprinting burden as well, which I have long described as a de facto tax of its own — it costs time and money to comply with, whatever label you put on it. Strip out both the price tag and the paperwork, and acquisitions climb further. Under Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), an arm in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes cannot be banned, and the government bears the burden of proving otherwise once a challenger shows common use. Rising ownership numbers make that burden harder to carry every year. I expect the Supreme Court to reaffirm the common-use test in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, the consolidated AR-15 cases in which certiorari was granted June 30, 2026, with a decision by the end of the term in June 2027. No argument date has been set as of this writing, and that date is my forecast, not a docketed fact — but blue-state suppressor and short-barreled-rifle bans will be squarely in that decision’s path.
A Track Record I Stand On
I do not offer that forecast lightly. On June 30, 2025, before the One Big Beautiful Bill had even been signed, I recorded and later replayed a segment arguing that zeroing the NFA tax, on its own, would eventually strip the constitutional basis for the registration and fingerprinting requirements, because those requirements exist only to police tax compliance. That prediction preceded the statute’s enactment by days and preceded Judge Hendrix’s judgment by more than a year. Today, in August 2026, blue-state suppressor and short-barreled-rifle bans have not fallen. That is still ahead of us. But one Texas judgment, two sister cases building the same record, an appeal window the government is running out of runway on, and a Supreme Court term already teed up to reaffirm common use are not separate stories. They are the same case, one brick at a time.
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.