A federal judge in Texas permanently blocked the ATF from enforcing National Firearms Act registration requirements for suppressors and short-barreled firearms, ruling the regulations lost their constitutional footing the moment Congress eliminated the underlying tax.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix issued the ruling from the Northern District of Texas, finding that NFA provisions requiring registration, reporting, and recordkeeping for firearm suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns exceed Congress' constitutional authority. The permanent injunction bars the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives from enforcing those requirements against the plaintiffs, a coalition of 15 states, firearms manufacturers, retailers, advocacy organizations, and individual gun owners.
Kansas led the lawsuit alongside Texas, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The case, Jensen v. ATF, was filed in October 2025 after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the $200 federal tax on suppressors and short-barrel rifles while leaving the registration requirements in place.
The logic of the ruling is straightforward. The NFA's registration regime was upheld decades ago as a valid exercise of Congress' taxing power. The 1937 Supreme Court precedent treated the law as "only a taxing measure." But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced the NFA's transfer and manufacturing tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and certain other firearms to $0, effective January 1, 2026.
Once the tax disappeared, so did the rationale. Judge Hendrix wrote that "the regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power." He went further, rejecting the Department of Justice's fallback argument that the registration requirements could survive under the commerce clause. The court found Congress enacted the NFA solely under its taxing power, and the government could not retroactively graft a new constitutional basis onto the statute.
"The challenged NFA provisions are unconstitutional," Hendrix wrote in the opinion.
The ruling mirrors a principle conservatives have long championed: the federal government possesses only the powers the Constitution grants it. When the underlying authority vanishes, the regulatory apparatus built on top of it cannot stand on its own. Federal courts have increasingly confronted similar questions as Congress and the courts reexamine the scope of administrative power, a trend visible in recent rulings blocking federal agency overreach across multiple policy areas.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who spearheaded the multi-state coalition, framed the decision as a direct rebuke to federal overreach on firearms regulation. Kobach said the ruling reinforces constitutional limits on federal power and removes what he described as unnecessary barriers for law-abiding gun owners.
"Today, the state of Kansas and our fellow plaintiffs won a great victory against the U.S. Department of Justice, which had been wrongly defending an unconstitutional law. The federal government has no right to demand that American citizens ask for permission before putting an accessory on their firearm to protect their hearing."
Kobach followed with a broader constitutional argument.
"Our Constitution provides for a government of limited powers at the federal level. We must always be vigilant to enforce those constitutional limits, especially when government overreach threatens the right of Americans to keep and bear arms."
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, one of the plaintiff organizations, echoed that position. "We are delighted with the ruling from Judge Hendrix," Gottlieb said. "With the tax no longer in existence, there was no logical reason for the ATF's registration requirement to continue."
Judge Hendrix limited the injunction's reach. He declined to issue a nationwide order barring ATF enforcement, citing the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. CASA, which restricts universal injunctions that extend relief to nonparties. The permanent injunction applies only to the plaintiffs, the 15 states, the individual plaintiffs, and members of plaintiff organizations including the Texas State Rifle Association and CCRKBA.
That distinction matters. Gun owners in the other 35 states are not covered by the ruling. Whether the decision's reasoning spreads depends on future litigation and, potentially, an appeal. The DOJ may challenge the ruling before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, though no formal appeal has been announced.
Hendrix also chose not to address the plaintiffs' Second Amendment claims. The court found that the Article I ruling, striking down the registration provisions on structural constitutional grounds, gave the plaintiffs the same practical relief they sought. By resolving the case without reaching the Second Amendment, Hendrix avoided setting a broader precedent on the right to bear arms, though the structural holding itself carries significant weight for future challenges to federal firearms regulation.
The decision to resolve the case on Article I grounds rather than the Second Amendment may actually make the ruling harder to overturn on appeal. Courts generally prefer narrow holdings, and the taxing-power argument rests on a concrete factual change, Congress zeroed out the tax, rather than on the more contested terrain of individual gun rights. Constitutional challenges to government overreach have produced mixed results in federal courts recently, as seen in cases where officials have invoked constitutional provisions to block expansive government programs.
Jensen v. ATF is not the only challenge to the NFA's registration regime. A parallel lawsuit led by the NRA makes similar arguments about the taxing power while adding Second Amendment claims under the Supreme Court's Heller and Bruen standards. That case is assigned to another Trump-appointed judge.
The two cases together represent the most significant legal challenge to federal firearms registration in decades. Gun Owners of America, which played a central role in organizing the litigation, argued in its amended complaint that "the NFA cannot be upheld under any other Article I power." Fifteen Republican-led state attorneys general lining up behind that argument signals broad political support for dismantling the NFA's registration apparatus, at least as applied to suppressors and short-barreled firearms.
The political dynamics are clear. When Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and zeroed out the NFA tax, it set the stage for exactly this kind of constitutional challenge. Legislators eliminated the revenue justification. Litigators followed with the obvious question: if the government is no longer collecting a tax, what authority does it have to maintain a registry that was only ever justified as a tax-collection mechanism?
Judge Hendrix answered that question plainly. None.
Democrats and progressive officials who have spent years defending expansive federal regulatory power now face a ruling that applies their own logic against them. The NFA's registration requirements survived for nearly a century because courts treated them as a tax measure. Congress changed the law. The constitutional math changed with it. Progressives who have reacted with outrage to unfavorable court rulings in other contexts will likely treat this decision as another front in the broader fight over judicial power and firearms policy.
For gun owners in the 15 plaintiff states, the practical effect is immediate: the ATF cannot require them to register suppressors, short-barreled rifles, or short-barreled shotguns under the NFA's challenged provisions. For gun owners elsewhere, the ruling offers a legal roadmap. And for the DOJ, it presents a choice, accept the decision or take it to the 5th Circuit, where the appellate bench may prove no friendlier to the government's position.
The broader trend is unmistakable. Federal courts are increasingly willing to hold agencies to the constitutional limits of the statutes they enforce. When Congress changes the law, the regulatory scaffolding built on the old version does not get grandfathered in. Agencies that resist enforcement of the law as written, or cling to authority the law no longer supports, will keep losing in court.
Law-abiding gun owners did not change. The Constitution did not change. Congress changed the tax code, and a federal judge held the government to the consequences. That is how limited government is supposed to work.