Two separate legal developments are moving toward each other, and most people following them have not connected the dots. One is the judgment out of Texas that enjoined the operative registration machinery of the National Firearms Act. The other is the pair of semi-automatic rifle cases now pending at the Supreme Court. Taken together, they set up a challenge to state suppressor and short-barrel laws that the anti-gun states are going to have real trouble answering.
What the Texas Judgment Did, and What It Left Alone
On August 5, 2026, Judge James Wesley Hendrix entered final judgment in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, No. 6:25-CV-056-H, and the consolidated Jensen v. ATF, No. 6:26-CV-227, in the San Angelo Division of the Northern District of Texas. The holding rested on Article I, not the Second Amendment: once the One Big Beautiful Bill Act zeroed the $200 making and transfer tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns effective January 1, 2026, the registration provisions attached to that tax could no longer be sustained as incident to a revenue measure.
That judgment reaches federal law only. If you live in California, Illinois, or Massachusetts, your state’s prohibition is untouched and you must still comply with it. The Justice Department has not appealed, and I do not expect it to; the appeal window under the federal rules runs into early October. My own assessment is that the injunction stays on the books.
The Record Being Built Is Evidence Against the States
Now consider what those two facts produce over the next twelve months. The acquisition tax is gone, and for everyone covered by the Texas judgment the fingerprint cards, photographs, and registration wait are gone with it. Lower price and lower friction produce exactly what any first-year economics student would predict, and the transfer numbers this year already show it.
This is not merely commercially interesting. It is evidentiary. Every suppressor and every short-barreled rifle lawfully acquired in this period becomes part of the factual record on whether these arms are in common use among law-abiding Americans for lawful purposes. The party that record will eventually be used against is not the federal government, which has already lost that fight in Texas. It is the states.
Viramontes and Grant Ask a Broader Question Than AR-15s
The Supreme Court granted certiorari on June 30, 2026, in Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, and Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, consolidating a challenge to Cook County’s ordinance with one to Connecticut’s statute. Read the question presented carefully. It asks whether the Second Amendment protects AR-15-platform and similar semi-automatic rifles. Those last three words carry weight: this is not litigated as a referendum on one rifle, but on a class of firearms built around a technology roughly a century old.
The Court has not calendared argument. My forecast, and I am content to be held to it, is argument in the first week of December 2026 and a decision in the last days of June 2027. I expect that decision to reaffirm what District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), already established: an arm in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes is protected, and it cannot be banned.
Common Use Puts the Burden on the Government
Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), the text comes first, and once conduct falls within it the government must justify its regulation by reference to the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The common-use inquiry sits inside that second step, which means the burden of proof belongs to the state. A state defending a suppressor ban will have to prove that suppressors are not in common use for lawful purposes.
By the summer of 2027, that will be an unwinnable position. Suppressors are instruments that facilitate armed self-defense, and short-barreled rifles and shotguns are semi-automatic firearms occupying the space between the handgun protected in Heller and the rifle I expect to be protected in Viramontes. No coherent constitutional principle protects a rifled handgun barrel and a rifle barrel while leaving the intermediate lengths unprotected.
Bans, Registration, and Targeted Taxes Fall Together
States regulate these arms three ways: outright prohibition, mandatory registration, and targeted taxation. A common-use reaffirmation reaches all three.
Prohibitions go the way of the ordinances struck in Heller and in McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010). Registration schemes face the analysis then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh set out in his dissent in Heller v. District of Columbia, 670 F.3d 1244 (D.C. Cir. 2011), where he argued that no historical tradition supports registering ordinary firearms. And targeted taxes run into the principle behind Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, 460 U.S. 575 (1983), which struck a tax singling out the press, and behind the poll-tax holding in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966). Those two decisions rest on different doctrinal footings, but the through-line is one I stand behind: government may not impose a differential tax on the exercise of a constitutional right. A future administration that wanted to price suppressors out of reach with a $10,000 levy would find that route closed.
The lawsuits that will make these arguments are being drafted now. The record they will rely on is being built every day the Texas injunction stands.
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.