OMG! Gun Rights Absolutists Are Working to Tear Down the NFA! And They’re Making Progress! OMG!

By Dan Zimmerman

With the political winds blowing in its favor, the GOA began drafting language some time last year to remove suppressors and short-barreled long guns from the NFA. After sharing the proposal with a few industry leaders, they worked with sympathetic Republican lawmakers to wedge it into the budget reconciliation bill – Andrew Clyde on the House side, and Roger Marshall, Mike Crapo and Steve Daines in the Senate.

“We had the language and we had key members of Congress to introduce it,” [Luis] Valdes, the GOA spokesman, said. “We’ve been looking at challenging the NFA since GOA first came into existence 50 years ago. The NFA is clearly unconstitutional.”

The move came at a hospitable time, with Trump urging Congress to use the budget reconciliation process to pass his “big, beautiful” bill, spurring a flurry of hasty lawmaking.

Still, the NFA proposal touched off weeks of high-stakes wrangling. The version passed by the House only removed the tax on suppressors – an easy sell to moderate Republicans, but which the GOA viewed as far too watered-down. The Senate version included a full repeal of silencers and short-barreled long guns from the NFA, only for the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, to find that the proposal violated the “Byrd rule” that bars extraneous measures from consideration during budget reconciliation. The GOA responded with a national alert calling to “fire the anti-gun parliamentarian now!”

The final version of the sweeping budget bill left intact the NFA’s registration requirements, which include some extra paperwork and fingerprint submission, but dropped the tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns to $0. The changes left machine gun restrictions untouched.

It was a remarkably swift reversal of key provisions of one of America’s bedrock gun laws. But instead of declaring victory, when Trump signed the budget bill into law on 4 July, the GOA immediately filed what it called a “big, beautiful lawsuit” seeking to overturn the NFA restrictions on suppressors and short-barreled long guns entirely.

Within a month, 15 Republican-led states had joined as plaintiffs. On 1 August, the Firearms Policy Coalition, another gun rights group, filed a similar lawsuit, joined by the NRA. What had seemed like an outlandish position only a few months earlier was suddenly becoming the conservative political consensus.

— Roque Planas in Inside the gun absolutists’ bold plot to repeal one of America’s strongest firearms laws