Federal Court Strikes Down Key National Firearms Act Restrictions

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A federal court in Texas has dealt a significant blow to portions of the National Firearms Act (NFA), ruling that the federal government can no longer enforce several longstanding registration and regulatory requirements for firearms that Congress no longer taxes.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas concluded that Congress eliminated the constitutional foundation for regulating several categories of firearms under the NFA when lawmakers reduced their transfer and making taxes to zero. Those categories include silencers, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and firearms classified under the NFA as “any other weapon,” or AOWs. The decision arose from consolidated challenges brought in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF and Jensen v. ATF. The plaintiffs included individual gun owners, firearms businesses, gun-rights organizations, and 15 states, including Texas. They argued that the NFA's regulatory requirements for firearms no longer subject to federal transfer and making taxes exceed Congress's powers under Article I of the Constitution. They also raised Second Amendment claims.

Hendrix agreed with the plaintiffs on the Article I question and therefore declined to decide the Second Amendment issue. The result is an important ruling not merely for federal firearms policy, but for the broader constitutional principle that the federal government possesses only those powers granted to it by the Constitution.

Congress Eliminated NFA Taxes, Not Regulations

Congress originally enacted the National Firearms Act in 1934 as a taxing statute. Rather than simply prohibiting certain firearms, Congress imposed substantial taxes on their manufacture and transfer and surrounded those taxes with registration, application, recordkeeping, and enforcement requirements. The court noted that the original $200 transfer and making taxes would amount to roughly $5,000 in today's dollars and were “explicitly intended to tax [NFA] weapons out of existence.”

Those taxes provided the constitutional foundation for the broader regulatory scheme. As Hendrix explained, the Supreme Court had previously upheld the NFA as a taxing measure because its registration requirements were designed to assist the federal government in collecting revenue.

That framework changed substantially when Congress enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025.

Beginning January 1, 2026, the law reduced the federal transfer and making taxes to $0 for silencers, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and AOWs. Congress did not eliminate the taxes applicable to machineguns and destructive devices, nor did it repeal the separate occupational tax imposed on certain firearms businesses. The problem identified by the court was that Congress eliminated the taxes for those four categories of firearms while leaving much of the NFA regulatory machinery intact.

Individuals still faced requirements involving ATF applications, fingerprints, photographs, personal information, firearm specifications, law enforcement notification, federal approval, registration, and criminal penalties. The NFA also continued requiring covered firearms to be entered into the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, which records information about the firearm and the person entitled to possess it.

Congress, in other words, removed the tax but left the regulatory structure that had historically been justified as a mechanism for administering that tax. That proved fatal to the government's position.

Texas Federal Court Says the NFA Lost Its Constitutional Foundation

The central constitutional principle underlying Hendrix's decision is straightforward. The federal government does not possess a general police power. Congress must identify an enumerated constitutional power authorizing its legislation.

As the court put it:

“No matter how much the federal government grows, ‘it still must show that a constitutional grant of power authorizes each of its actions.’”

Hendrix emphasized that this limitation is not merely a technical feature of constitutional law. The division of governmental authority itself protects individual liberty from arbitrary power. For most of the NFA's existence, the relevant power was Congress's constitutional authority to tax. The Supreme Court upheld that arrangement in Sonzinsky v. United States in 1937 because the NFA generated federal revenue and its accompanying regulations facilitated the collection of that revenue.

But Hendrix concluded that a tax that collects no money cannot provide the constitutional justification for a regulatory regime.

The court explained:

“The challenged NFA provisions do not support the collection of any revenue.”

And later:

“There is simply no revenue to be had.”

The court concluded that because the transfer and making taxes had been set at zero, the accompanying regulatory requirements for transferring, making, and possessing those untaxed firearms could no longer be sustained under Congress's taxing power. That distinction is essential. Hendrix did not conclude that Congress could never regulate these firearms. Rather, he concluded that the particular regulatory structure Congress had enacted was constitutionally dependent upon a tax that Congress itself subsequently eliminated.

Commerce Clause Could Not Save the NFA

The Biden and Trump administrations have increasingly confronted litigation testing the limits of federal administrative and regulatory authority, and the government's defense here presented another important question: Could the NFA's restrictions simply be justified under a different constitutional power?

The federal government argued that even if the taxing power no longer supported the challenged provisions, Congress's authority under the Commerce Clause could sustain them.

Hendrix rejected that argument. The court found that Congress enacted the NFA pursuant to its taxing power rather than its authority to regulate interstate commerce. The statute's language focuses extensively on taxation, and the NFA remains located within Title 26 of the U.S. Code, the Internal Revenue Code. The challenged provisions also contain no general jurisdictional requirement connecting regulated conduct to interstate commerce.

That differs from the Gun Control Act, which expressly regulates firearms through Congress's commerce authority. Hendrix devoted substantial attention to the difference between the two statutes, noting that Congress has demonstrated that it knows how to invoke interstate commerce when legislating on firearms.

The court ultimately concluded:

“Congress passed the NFA under its taxing power only.”

Therefore, the government could not retroactively substitute the Commerce Clause as the constitutional justification for regulations enacted pursuant to a different congressional power.

Hendrix's reasoning carries implications extending beyond firearms. If upheld on appeal, the decision reinforces the principle that courts cannot simply search the Constitution for some hypothetical authority Congress might have used after the authority actually supporting a statute disappears.

As the court explained:

“The government cannot employ post-hoc justifications to save a statute based on an enumerated power that Congress never invoked.”

Nor, Hendrix added, may courts effectively rewrite legislation to save it because a court “may not exercise legislative functions to save the law from conflict with constitutional limitation.”

Court Rejects Necessary and Proper Clause Argument

The federal government also attempted to connect the remaining NFA restrictions to the special occupational tax that Congress continues imposing on certain firearms manufacturers, importers, and dealers. The court was unconvinced.

The occupational tax operates under its own regulatory framework, while the provisions challenged by the plaintiffs historically supported the separate transfer and making taxes. Hendrix concluded that the government could not use the Necessary and Proper Clause to transform the registration requirements for untaxed firearms into enforcement mechanisms for a different tax. The government's theory also raised a much broader federalism concern. If virtually any regulatory requirement could be connected to some distant federal tax, the Necessary and Proper Clause could become a vehicle for effectively creating a general federal police power.

Hendrix illustrated the problem with an intentionally absurd example. If Congress imposed a $1 occupational tax on grocers, the government's theory could conceivably allow Washington to impose federal applications and fingerprinting requirements on anyone possessing broccoli simply to ensure that people were not illegally avoiding the grocer tax.

“If that is outlandish for broccoli,” the court observed, “it is no less so for firearms.”

The larger constitutional principle is important. The Necessary and Proper Clause assists Congress in exercising its enumerated powers. It does not create an independent source of unlimited regulatory authority.

Court Does Not Reach the Second Amendment

Despite the obvious implications for gun rights, this is not technically a Second Amendment ruling. Both sets of plaintiffs argued that the challenged NFA provisions also violated the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But after concluding that the restrictions exceeded Congress's enumerated Article I powers, Hendrix declined to reach those claims.

The plaintiffs agreed that the court could avoid deciding the Second Amendment question if they prevailed on their enumerated-powers claims. Hendrix relied upon the longstanding judicial principle that courts should avoid deciding constitutional questions unnecessarily. That distinction matters when describing the scope of the decision. The court did not rule that silencers or short-barreled rifles are protected arms under the Supreme Court's modern Second Amendment jurisprudence. Nor did Hendrix conduct the historical-tradition analysis associated with New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Instead, the decision asks an antecedent question: Does Congress have constitutional authority to impose these particular federal regulations in the first place? The court concluded that it does not, at least under the statutory structure Congress left behind after eliminating the taxes.

NFA Injunction Is Not Nationwide

The practical scope of the decision also requires some caution. Hendrix declared the challenged provisions unconstitutional, but he did not issue a universal injunction preventing the federal government from enforcing them against everyone in the United States.

That distinction follows the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which substantially limited federal courts' ability to issue universal injunctions. Hendrix concluded that his authority extended only as far as necessary to provide complete relief to the parties before him. The injunction therefore protects the plaintiffs and, where applicable, their agencies, political subdivisions, members, and customers. The court also extended protection to current and future customers when necessary to remedy injuries suffered by commercial plaintiffs and members.

That produces an unusual practical situation. The court concluded that the challenged NFA provisions are unconstitutional, but the injunction does not automatically prevent ATF from enforcing those provisions against every American. Hendrix expressly acknowledged that distinction:

“The challenged NFA provisions are unconstitutional.”

But because federal courts lack authority to issue universal relief merely because a statute has been found unconstitutional, the practical consequences of that conclusion are narrower than the constitutional holding itself. The court also stayed its order for seven days to provide the federal government an opportunity to seek appellate relief.

Congress May Have to Revisit the NFA

The most immediate policy implication is that Congress may eventually have to decide what it actually wants the National Firearms Act to be. Lawmakers deliberately eliminated the transfer and making taxes for silencers, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and AOWs while preserving the regulatory regime built around those taxes. Hendrix's ruling concludes that Congress cannot constitutionally have it both ways.

If appellate courts ultimately agree, Congress would face several potential paths. It could accept the consequences of eliminating the taxes and remove the associated federal registration requirements. It could attempt to restore some form of revenue-generating tax. Or lawmakers could attempt to enact a different regulatory framework expressly grounded in another enumerated power, most obviously the Commerce Clause.

That final approach, however, would almost certainly generate another round of constitutional litigation. A new commerce-based statute could raise questions concerning the limits of federal authority over purely intrastate firearm possession, manufacturing, or transfers. Separate Second Amendment challenges would also remain unresolved because Hendrix expressly declined to decide them.

The ruling therefore does not necessarily represent the end of litigation over the National Firearms Act. It may instead mark the beginning of a much larger debate over what remains of the NFA after Congress dismantled a significant portion of the taxation scheme upon which the law's constitutional foundation rested.

Texas NFA Case Reinforces Constitutional Limits on Federal Power

Perhaps the broadest takeaway from Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF has less to do with the specific firearms involved than with the structure of the Constitution itself. Congress possesses enormous authority, but it does not possess unlimited authority. The federal government must connect its actions to powers actually granted by the Constitution. Hendrix repeatedly returned to that principle throughout his opinion.

The decision is particularly notable because the court refused to rescue Congress from the consequences of Congress's own legislative choices. Congress could have reconsidered the regulatory provisions when it eliminated the taxes supporting them. It did not. The executive branch then asked the judiciary to preserve those regulations through constitutional authorities that the court concluded Congress had never invoked. Hendrix refused.

His closing observation captures the separation-of-powers issue succinctly:

“Efforts to render the NFA constitutional must come from Congress, not this Court.”

That principle should matter regardless of the underlying policy dispute. Congress writes federal law. The executive branch enforces it. Courts interpret it. When legislation exceeds the powers delegated to the federal government, it is not the judiciary's responsibility to reconstruct the statute into something Congress might constitutionally have enacted.

For gun-rights advocates, the immediate result is a substantial victory against federal restrictions on silencers, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and other NFA-regulated firearms. But the potentially lasting significance of the ruling lies in its reaffirmation of a more fundamental constitutional principle: federal power is delegated, enumerated, and limited.

As Hendrix wrote in concluding the 66-page opinion, the challenged NFA provisions “exceed Congress’s Article I enumerated powers and are therefore unconstitutional.” Whether that conclusion survives appellate review could determine not only the future of major portions of the National Firearms Act, but also how aggressively federal courts enforce the constitutional boundaries surrounding Congress's enumerated powers.

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