The NFA (National Firearms Act) has been a bone of contention between 2A advocates and anti-2A agitators for literally decades (that’s not an exaggeration).
One of the biggest beefs against the legislation is the accusation that it violates both the Second Amendment and the Fourth Amendment by setting up databases to track people who own certain firearms accessories. Having that kind of database is a way of tracking certain people (gun owners, in this case) and can easily be used to make it easier to infringe on Americans’ Second Amendment rights.
Think of abusing red flag laws, and you have the right idea.
Fortunately, though, someone has decided to take the issue to court based on a big beautiful premise. Michael Clements writes,
Gun rights organizations sued the government on July 4 to have the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 declared an unconstitutional gun registry for silencers, short-barreled shotguns, and short-barreled rifles.According to the lawsuit, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act effectively removed the tax on these items by reducing it from $200 to $0. However, the firearms must still be registered, making the NFA a firearms registry.
Machine guns and destructive devices are still subject to the $200 NFA tax.
In the 1937 U.S. Supreme Court case, Sonzinsky v. United States, the high court ruled the NFA is a legal exercise of Congress’s taxing authority. The court found that the government could gather information on the owners of certain firearms and their accessories as part of the tax system.
Since the firearms and related items now won’t be taxed, there is no reason for the government to gather that data, the lawsuit states.
“Plaintiffs seek an order declaring that the NFA is unconstitutional with respect to the untaxed firearms it purports to regulate and enjoining enforcement of the unconstitutional provisions,” the lawsuit states.
That is simply fantastic reasoning, and completely logical.
Since the NFA was allowed to stand by the court because it was considered to be a tax by the court (as a side note, that’s the same reasoning that allowed Obamacare to remain in place), with the passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, there is no longer any tax being collected for those items. That means that the NFA doesn’t have any legal justification for remaining in place.
In other words, it should be thrown out because it is no longer legal.
I love that.
Of course, I’d love all gun control to be thrown out. It’s the right thing to do, the constitutional thing to do, and the moral thing to do because of the lives that would be saved by doing that.
And those are all great reasons.
