Gun Rights Groups Sue To Overturn Federal Weapons Registration
A squad of Second Amendment rights organizations, including the Second Amendment Foundation, the National Rifle Association, and the Firearms Policy Coalition, along with some private citizen plaintiffs, think that new changes in government taxes on owning certain weapons create a chink in the legal armor of the federal weapon registration regime established in the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA).
They have thus filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Justice Department, seeking to end the registration requirements of that act.
Part of the recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the suit notes, “eliminated the making and transfer taxes on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and NFA-defined ‘any other weapons,’ while leaving the registration requirements intact. In other words, individuals no longer have to pay taxes for making and transferring most firearms under the NFA, but the firearms are still required to be registered.”
There’s the rub, the plaintiffs insist. They maintain that the only valid constitutional excuse for the registration was the taxes. Thus, constitutionally, with the taxes gone, the registration requirements also must go away.
As the suit puts it, with the taxes eliminated on items “including suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns,” the NFA registration requirement should now be seen as “unconstitutional as applied to those arms.”
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