Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times,
A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the registration and approval requirements for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns in the National Firearms Act (NFA) are unconstitutional.
In the case of Silencer Shop Foundation v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), U.S. District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix found that the requirements exceeded Congress’s constitutional authority once the NFA’s taxes on making or transferring those arms were eliminated. The taxes were reduced to zero last year.
The court found that the NFA, as enacted in 1934, passed constitutional muster as an act of Congress’s taxing power because the regulatory requirements—including registration, applications, ATF approval, fingerprinting, and related criminal penalties—aided the collection of NFA taxes.
This is in line with the 1937 U.S. Supreme Court case, Sonzinsky v. United States, in which the high court ruled the NFA is a legal exercise of Congress’s taxing authority. In that decision, the court found that the government could gather information on the owners of certain firearms and their accessories that were subject to the NFA’s $200 excise as part of the tax collection process.
Wednesday’s ruling in response to two consolidated cases—Jensen v. ATF, with Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF—in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, held that once Congress el
