Two Texans became the first Americans in more than nine decades to purchase suppressors without federal registration after a Trump-appointed judge blocked enforcement of key National Firearms Act requirements, culminating a years-long legislative and legal campaign by gun-rights groups that began largely out of public view.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A years-long effort by gun-rights organizations, Republican lawmakers and attorneys culminated shortly after midnight Aug. 13 at a gun store in Leander, Texas, where two men purchased suppressors without completing the federal registration process that had accompanied such transactions since the National Firearms Act was enacted in 1934.
Republican Texas congressional nominee Brandon Herrera and Republican state Rep. Wes Virdell received the suppressors at Silencer Shop after the Trump administration confirmed it would not attempt to prevent a federal court injunction from taking effect.
The transactions required no ATF Form 4 registration.
Gun Owners of America said in an X post at 1:38 a.m. EDT that Herrera completed a National Instant Criminal Background Check System check, while Virdell used a valid Texas concealed-carry permit in place of the background check.
“For 92 years, gun owners have had their second amendment rights restricted because of unconstitutional legislation that was passed by misguided politicians,” Virdell told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The ruling marks a historical reversal that should have happened decades ago. Gun owners are grateful for the ruling.”
Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., who had been deeply involved in the legislative effort that helped set up the legal challenge, described the transactions as the restoration of a constitutional right.
“Well, this is a historic restoration of the Second Amendment, of our Second Amendment liberties that was literally legislatively taken from us in 1934,” Clyde told the DCNF after the ceremony. “If you can tax a constitutional right, and the Second Amendment is a constitutional right, as we all know, and governments are here to preserve and protect those rights. And that’s not what happened in 1934. Through taxation, those rights were denied.”
“And so this is a removal of that, so it’s a great day for liberty,” Clyde continued. “It’s a great day for the restoration of the Second Amendment and I’m really excited about it. I’m excited for our entire country.”
The midnight transactions came one day after Clyde announced that the Trump administration had confirmed it would not try to block a federal ruling that prevented the government from enforcing key National Firearms Act requirements against protected plaintiffs.
GOA subsequently announced that suppressor transfers would begin at 12:01 a.m. Central time on Aug. 13.
“The injunction is in effect and the Department of Justice is not allowed to enforce the NFA against GOA members and so there are already gun stores transferring unregistered suppressors right now,” GOA Federal Affairs Director Aidan Johnston told the DCNF after the first transactions. “It’s going to be very, very hard for ATF to ever put the genie back in the bottle. How will they know what suppressors were registered? Like their registry is already messed up. It’s completely inaccurate. How many suppressors were registered to a gun store that are now in civilian hands?”
ATF Director Robert Cekada later addressed what he called misinformation surrounding the decision and the agency’s response.
In a Friday post on X, Cekada said the ATF would comply with the court order while developing formal guidance.
“ATF respects the Court’s ruling and the rule of law. We are following the order and will not take enforcement action against protected parties inconsistent with that ruling,” Cekada posted. “We are working diligently on clear guidance. Getting it RIGHT matters more than getting it out fast. That means carefully navigating federal and state laws so that manufacturers, FFLs, and law-abiding gun owners aren’t left with legal problems – today or under a future administration.”
“Thank you for your patience as we focus on developing the guidance. It will be posted online as soon as we are done,” Cekada said.
The immediate legal opening followed an Aug. 5 ruling by U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas, a Trump appointee.
Hendrix struck down enforcement of the challenged NFA requirements after Congress had reduced the federal transfer tax on suppressors and several other NFA-regulated firearms to $0.
The judge concluded that eliminating the tax undermined the constitutional basis for registration and processing requirements that had historically been justified as mechanisms for administering a tax.
Johnston said the Justice Department had argued that other aspects of the NFA remained valid, including because manufacturers were still subject to taxation and because Congress could rely on other constitutional authorities.
“They defended the law, and they said that there’s still a tax on manufacturers, so we need the other paperwork in order to enforce; we need individual gun owners to fill out the tax paperwork so we know which dealers have paid their taxes,” Johnston told the DCNF. “They said that it was still justified under the Commerce Clause and the necessary and proper clauses of the Constitution. I mean, just really big stretches as far as constitutional legal theories.”
“We answered all their arguments and in the end, the judge didn’t rule on the Second Amendment issues and he didn’t rule on the Commerce Clause issues and he chose to rule on the taxes power and he said on the tax there’s no such thing as a $0 tax and he enjoined the government for enforcing any of the penalties associated with… that $0 tax,” Johnston continued.
The Texas litigation was only one piece of a broader legal campaign.
Gun Owners of America filed its case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on July 4, 2025, the same day President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law. The original GOA complaint is available here.
Other gun-rights organizations — including the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, Texas State Rifle Association, National Rifle Association, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and American Suppressor Association — pursued three additional cases: Jensen v. ATF in Texas, Brown v. ATF in Missouri and Roberts v. ATF in Kentucky.
The Second Amendment Foundation’s Texas lawsuit was consolidated with GOA’s case on June 8.
SAF Senior Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack said the reduction of the tax to zero created the legal opening the organizations had been waiting for.
“When the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed and the tax requirement for short-barrel rifles, short barrel shotguns, AOWs and suppressors went to zero, that’s what made our legal challenges possible because our legal theory was that, or it is that, remains that, that the NFA itself is a tax provision and that the regulatory requirements associated with that that we challenged in these cases had to do with Congress’s taxing authority,” Sack told the DCNF. “That was the constitutional hook that Congress drew upon in passing the tax.”
“So, when the taxes were reduced to zero, then all of the remaining regulatory registration requirements were no longer constitutional under the Congress’s taxing authority because what Congress had maintained all along from the 1930s onward was that the registration requirements were not about registering the firearms, they were about proving that you had paid your taxes, that they were tax records,” Sack continued.
Before Hendrix ruled, the Justice Department had already made notable concessions involving suppressors in separate litigation before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
In filings dating to May 2025, DOJ acknowledged that lawful or “beneficial use” of suppressors outweighed criminal misuse and conceded that suppressors were protected arms under the Second Amendment.
The department nevertheless argued that convictions for possessing unregistered suppressors could remain valid because the NFA functioned comparably to a “shall issue” licensing system, under which an agency must approve an application when specified requirements are satisfied.
The Justice Department’s decision to continue defending portions of the law drew criticism from gun-rights activists.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon defended the department’s institutional role during a June interview with the DCNF.
“I understand people have policy differences with DOJ’s enforcement of federal laws, but, in my opinion, and I’ve said this to many gun groups, the appropriate place to launch those policy discussions is in Congress, not with us,” Dhillon said.
“[It’s] the other team that picks and chooses which laws they’re gonna enforce, so that’s not what we do,” Dhillon added.
The department later underwent a leadership change.
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi stepped down in April while battling cancer. Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche assumed the job in an acting capacity before the Senate confirmed him as attorney general on Aug. 8.
Four days after Blanche’s confirmation, Clyde announced that the administration would allow Hendrix’s injunction to take effect.
That court fight itself had been made possible by a legislative strategy devised more than a year earlier.
The critical change occurred July 4, 2025, when Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill after Congress reduced to zero the NFA transfer taxes on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and firearms categorized as “any other weapons,” or AOWs.
The House had concurred with the Senate’s amended version of the legislation on July 3 in a 218-214 vote.
The Senate had approved its version July 1 by a 51-50 vote, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie in his constitutional role as president of the Senate.
Arriving at the zero-dollar tax was itself a compromise.
The House originally passed its version of the legislation on May 22, 2025, with language removing suppressors from the National Firearms Act entirely. That version cleared the chamber in a House vote.
When the measure reached the Senate, Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough conducted the reconciliation review known as a “Byrd bath.”
Under Section 313 of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, reconciliation legislation can avoid the Senate filibuster but cannot contain “extraneous” provisions without sufficient budgetary effects, according to a Congressional Research Service report.
MacDonough determined that removing suppressors from the NFA violated the Byrd rule.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told the DCNF that he was “initially annoyed” by the decision.
“Excessive deference to the Parliamentarian keeping good legislation down is an old, familiar story in the Senate,” Lee said.
Johnston was even more critical.
“This is a parliamentarian who was originally hired by [former Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid,” Johnston told the DCNF. “So why does John Thune have a Harry Reid bureaucrat working for him? I don’t know.”
Clyde and Senate allies, including Lee, then developed an alternative designed to survive reconciliation rules: rather than removing the affected firearms from the NFA, Congress would reduce their transfer tax to zero.
That maneuver preserved the provision’s budgetary character while later becoming the foundation for the constitutional challenge to the remaining registration requirements.
Clyde had entered the congressional fight as sponsor of the SHORT Act, while Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., introduced the Hearing Protection Act.
Clyde said persuading Republican colleagues required explaining how the original NFA tax had operated when Congress enacted it during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.
“I think that was probably the biggest challenge, helping folks to understand exactly what the National Firearms Act had been doing literally for 90 years. I mean, the taxes were used punitively. In 1934, a suppressor was like $6, $6.50, okay?” Clyde told the DCNF. “Well, you put a $200 tax on something [that’s] $6.50, it eliminates it. And that’s exactly what happened, you know? So helping people understand exactly what the taxes had done. I mean, even today, short-barreled firearms, like a short-barreled shotgun, all right, $400 with a $200 tax.”
Behind those public congressional efforts, GOA says it was conducting a deliberately quiet lobbying campaign.
Johnston said the organization believed reconciliation legislation presented the best opportunity for major changes involving federally regulated firearms because the NFA imposed explicit taxes that could fit within a budget bill.
“We did a lot of behind the scenes lobbying for about six months… all of this had to be top secret,” Johnston told the DCNF. “We didn’t want the Democrats or the anti-gunners to get any word of what we were planning on the big beautiful bill.”
GOA intentionally avoided publicly advertising its plans involving suppressors and other NFA-regulated weapons during the opening months of the 119th Congress, according to Johnston.
“GOA was locked in and we knew our chance to get something done on guns this Congress was going to have to do with taxes, and there’s only two gun taxes out there: The National Firearms Act, which is a $200 tax on silencers, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, [any other weapons [AOWs)], machine guns, and destructive devices, and then there’s like this Pittman Robertson tax on all guns and ammunition at 10% and 11%,” Johnston told the DCNF in an interview. “And so we decided we wanted to target the silencer regulations, the silencer tax, and the short barrel stuff, especially because President [Joe] Biden had weaponized the short barrel rifle statute in order to ban millions of pistol brace weapons.”
The controversy over pistol braces had been building for years.
The devices became popular during the early 2010s, particularly among disabled shooters and veterans who used them to stabilize AR-15-style pistols.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives initially considered the braces lawful, including when a shooter shouldered the firearm, before changing its interpretation in 2015, according to ConcealedCarry.com.
In June 2020, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., accused the ATF of quietly developing new restrictions on the devices. Gaetz did not respond to multiple DCNF requests for comment.
After President Joe Biden took office, his administration moved toward treating firearms equipped with certain pistol braces as short-barreled rifles governed by the NFA.
ATF issued its final rule in January 2023 and gave affected gun owners 120 days to register qualifying firearms during an “amnesty” period or potentially face criminal penalties that included as much as 10 years in prison.
Gun-rights organizations challenged the rule almost immediately and ultimately secured court orders preventing its enforcement.
Trump’s return to the White House then created the opportunity for a legislative strategy in addition to litigation.
“One thing we could do is we could work with the [second Trump] administration to undo that regulation,” Johnston said. “The other thing we could do is just nullify that statute, try to repeal that statute.”
The campaign that followed eventually connected the pistol-brace fight, suppressor taxation and the broader structure of the National Firearms Act.
While the Texas injunction has already produced unregistered suppressor transactions for protected plaintiffs, gun-rights organizations are pursuing additional challenges that could expand the effect.
Oral arguments in Brown v. ATF, in which the National Rifle Association is a named plaintiff, took place Aug. 10.
Arguments in Roberts v. ATF in Kentucky are scheduled for Oct. 20 under a Monday court order.
“We’re incredibly excited for these next two cases to play out. We feel incredibly confident,” NRA spokesperson Justin Davis told the DCNF. “I think anybody who looks at the constitutionality of the NFA without the monetary tax, it’s incredibly clear that it’s unconstitutional.”
“If you talked to previous generations or people a few years ago, if they ever thought we’d be in the situation we’re in right now, having the opportunity to dismantle the NFA, I think they wouldn’t believe it,” Davis said. “I think it’s incredibly exciting to see that we are making serious progress for American gun owners.”
The current ruling does not itself erase every provision of the National Firearms Act nationwide, and Hendrix declined to resolve the broader Second Amendment and Commerce Clause arguments advanced in the litigation.
But the sequence of events — a deliberately quiet lobbying campaign, a zero-dollar tax enacted through reconciliation, litigation filed immediately after Trump signed the law and an injunction the administration elected not to halt — has already produced a result that gun-rights advocates had pursued for generations.
For the first time since 1934, at least some Americans protected by the court order have been able to acquire suppressors without going through the NFA registration system, turning what began as a concealed legislative strategy into one of the most consequential challenges to the 92-year-old federal firearms law in its history.
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