The Trump administration let the deadline pass to challenge a federal court ruling that struck down key registration requirements under the 92-year-old National Firearms Act, a move one gun store owner-turned-congressman calls the greatest restoration of Second Amendment rights in nearly a century.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix ruled on August 5 that the National Firearms Act's registration and transfer requirements for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns could no longer stand after Congress eliminated the law's $200 tax. The Trump administration's Department of Justice had seven days to file an emergency appeal. It did not. At midnight on Thursday, the ruling went into effect, and within hours, the first lawful unregistered suppressor transfer since 1934 was completed at a Texas firearms dealer.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican who owns a gun store called Clyde Armory, led the legislative effort that made the ruling possible. Last year, Clyde spearheaded the push to zero out the NFA's $200 tax on suppressors and short-barreled firearms through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Once that tax disappeared, gun rights groups, led by Gun Owners of America, argued in court that the federal registration requirements built on that taxing authority had lost their constitutional footing. Judge Hendrix agreed.
Clyde then led 48 Republican lawmakers in a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche urging the DOJ not to appeal. Fox News Digital reported the letter's blunt language:
"An appeal would prolong regulatory uncertainty for law-abiding gun owners and businesses and would consume DOJ resources defending a position that this Congress and now a federal district court has said cannot stand."
The DOJ listened. Clyde confirmed that the Trump administration would not appeal the ruling, cementing the legal victory. A DOJ statement provided to the New York Times said the department "respects Americans' Second Amendment rights and is currently assessing the impact of the court's ruling."
Clyde framed the fight in constitutional terms that cut to the bone of the NFA's original design. The 1934 law imposed a $200 tax, a staggering sum at the time, on the manufacture and transfer of suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and certain other firearms. The tax came with mandatory federal registration, fingerprinting, and ATF approval. For 92 years, the government justified that regulatory apparatus under its power to tax.
Clyde told Fox News Digital why eliminating the tax pulled the constitutional rug out from under the entire framework:
"If you can tax something legitimately, then you can actually destroy it through increased taxation. You might, quote, 'have a right on paper,' but you don't really have a right because you can't afford the right. Is that really a right? It's not."
He continued:
"So here we are removing the taxation on a constitutional right from a bill that was passed in 1934. And once you remove the tax aspect of it, then you remove the constitutionality of the registration aspect."
That logic carried the day in Judge Hendrix's courtroom. The ruling dismantled the federal fingerprinting, registration, and ATF approval requirements that had governed these firearms categories since the Roosevelt administration. Machine gun restrictions, which rest on separate statutory authority, remain intact.
The decision fits a broader pattern of Second Amendment gains under the current administration. Earlier this year, the Trump administration gutted dozens of ATF firearms rules in what amounted to the broadest agency overhaul on record, signaling a clear executive posture toward rolling back federal gun regulation.
Gun rights groups wasted no time. Silencer Shop, a plaintiff in the case known as Jensen v. ATF, completed the first lawful unregistered suppressor transfer since June 26, 1934, the day the original NFA took effect. Gun Owners of America announced the milestone, and Silencer Shop posted to X: "Proud to be making history with you!"
The transfer took place at a Texas firearms dealer just after midnight, the moment the ruling went live. Aidan Johnston, Gun Owners of America's director of federal affairs, put the moment in perspective.
"This is the first time in 92 years that any gun owner has been able to do this."
Clyde himself called it "literally, the greatest Second Amendment win in the history of our country." Erich Pratt, GOA's senior vice president, struck a similar tone: "The era of federal registration for constitutionally protected arms must end."
That historic first silencer transfer without federal registration marked a tangible, real-world shift, not just a legal abstraction, but a gun owner walking out of a store with a suppressor and no federal paperwork for the first time in nine decades.
Gun owners celebrating the win should read the fine print. The ruling is not a national injunction. It applies only to the parties that brought the lawsuit, specifically, current or future Gun Owners of America members and affiliated businesses. Every other American buying a suppressor or short-barreled firearm still faces the old NFA process, at least for the moment.
Johnston acknowledged that gap. "It's not fair that you should have to buy a Gun Owners of America membership in order to exercise your Second Amendment rights," he told the Washington Examiner. He urged the administration to "stand down and not to appeal and not to fight it."
The DOJ still has a 60-day window to file a conventional appeal, even though it passed on the emergency stay. And the department has yet to issue public guidance to gun dealers and buyers about how to handle the transition. That regulatory silence leaves the industry in a gray zone, dealers who are not parties to the lawsuit may hesitate to process transfers without ATF paperwork, unsure whether they are protected.
Meanwhile, courts in other parts of the country continue to wrestle with the boundaries of the Second Amendment. A federal appeals court recently struck down New Jersey's semiautomatic rifle ban, while in California, a Biden-appointed judge blocked the Trump DOJ's effort to halt the state's ban on Glock-style handguns. The legal landscape is shifting fast, and not always in the same direction.
Not everyone saw the moment as a victory. Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, issued a blistering statement on Thursday:
"Today, our government is failing us. At midnight, uniquely lethal weapons and devices, including silencers, short-barreled rifles, and shotguns, were deregulated for the first time in nearly a century."
Brown added that the DOJ "had the opportunity to act to protect our safety, but it failed to do so." She said the gun industry and silencer dealers were celebrating "while Americans are left less safe."
Brown's framing tells a familiar story: gun-control groups casting every expansion of firearms rights as an immediate public safety crisis. But Clyde and his allies see the same facts and draw the opposite conclusion, that the federal government spent 92 years taxing and registering a constitutional right, and that the legal foundation for doing so has now collapsed.
Clyde made the broader case plainly:
"When you protect the Second Amendment, which protects every other amendment in the entire Constitution, I think that's the teeth behind the Constitution."
He went further, arguing that the Second Amendment is the backstop for the First, the right to free assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to petition the government "without fear of persecution or prosecution."
The immediate question is whether the DOJ uses its remaining 60-day window to file a conventional appeal. Clyde's confirmation that the administration will not appeal suggests the answer is no, but the formal clock has not expired. If the ruling stands unchallenged, other gun rights organizations will almost certainly file their own lawsuits seeking the same relief for their members, a path that could effectively nationalize the outcome without a single national injunction.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act's tax reduction to $0 took effect January 1, 2026. Judge Hendrix's August 5 ruling followed within months. The DOJ's decision not to seek a stay followed within days. And the first unregistered suppressor sale followed within hours. The speed of this chain, from legislation to courtroom to gun counter, shows what happens when the executive branch, the legislative branch, and a federal court all move in the same direction on a constitutional question.
For 92 years, the National Firearms Act stood as one of the oldest pillars of federal gun regulation. A Georgia gun store owner chipped away at it from the inside of Congress, and the administration let the wall fall. Whether the rest of the country gets to walk through that opening depends on what happens in the next 60 days, and in the courtrooms that follow.
When the government stops taxing a right, it turns out the paperwork has a hard time justifying itself.
