I’m not a fan of the National Firearms Act.
Then, again, I’m a 2A absolutist, so the NFA is, in my considered but non-lawyer opinion, a clear violation of the Second Amendment.
How could it not be? It restricts access to firearms and firearms accessories for U.S. citizens.
But (and this is a good thing, at least according to anyone who actually cares about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights), the NFA has a little less of an impact on people than before. Michael Clements gives us the details:
A federal judge ruled on Aug. 5 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), Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas 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.
So, since no taxes are being collected on suppressors, SBRs, and short-barreled shotguns, then the registration requirement (which, let’s be honest, is what it was really about) is no longer valid either.
This line of completely logical thinking drives anti-2A activists, whether politicians or bureaucrats, crazy.
Why else would the ATF continue to try to fight to keep the registration requirements in place even after the fee was reduced to zero? It’s because they desperately want to track you and me in all that we do because we’re legal gun owners.
Or, at least, that’s why I think that they’re busybodies like that.
So, I think that this court decision is the right one. Everything that eats away at gun control is a good thing. Because there’s no such thing as good (or common sense) gun control.
