One Big Beautiful Lawsuit: GOA Declares War on the NFA
While many Americans were celebrating our nation’s founding on the 4th of July, Gun Owners of America (GOA), Gun Owners Foundation, and several industry leaders were busy launching a bold new effort to restore the Second Amendment to its full glory.
On the heels of President Trump signing the One Big Beautiful Bill—a sweeping pro-Second Amendment legislative package that reduced the National Firearms Act (NFA) excise tax to $0 on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, shotguns, and other regulated firearms—GOA and allies have filed what they’re calling the “One Big Beautiful Lawsuit” in federal court.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 was originally upheld by the Supreme Court as a tax law—not as a firearms regulation. The law imposed a hefty $200 tax (equal to roughly $5,000 today) on certain firearms, along with onerous registration and transfer requirements. Since then, it’s been used to create de facto bans and delays on perfectly legal firearm purchases.
But now that Congress has reduced the tax to $0, that justification vanishes. In other words, the government is trying to regulate without taxing—a direct contradiction of the law’s constitutional foundation.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, makes a simple but powerful argument: If there’s no tax, there’s no constitutional basis for the registry. If successful, this lawsuit would put an end to one of the largest and most intrusive federal gun registries in the nation.
Key Points from the Lawsuit
The NFA was upheld in Sonzinsky v. United States (1937) solely under Congress’s taxing power. Without a tax, the law has no constitutional legs to stand on.
The plaintiffs—including GOA, Silencer Shop Foundation, Palmetto State Armory, FRAC, and B&T USA—argue that the registration and transfer requirements now violate both the Second Amendment and Article I powers of Congress.
Individuals like Brady Wetz, a Texas gun owner, are being forced to hand over deeply personal data (fingerprints, home address, firearm serial numbers, etc.) to the federal government in order to own NFA-regulated items—despite there being no longer a tax justifying it.
Businesses are also harmed. The lawsuit cites economic losses, burdensome compliance costs, and lost customers who are deterred by the unconstitutional registration process.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the National Firearms Act’s registration and transfer rules unconstitutional as they apply to untaxed firearms, and to block the ATF and Department of Justice from enforcing those provisions. If successful, the case would effectively end the federal firearms registry for these categories of firearms—short-barreled rifles, shotguns, silencers, and others—once and for all. This could mark a landmark legal victory for gun owners, restoring constitutional freedoms that have long been suppressed by bureaucratic overreach.
We applaud GOA and their partners for not backing down. The Second Amendment is not a privilege, it’s a right. There’s no constitutional justification to maintain a registry for firearms that are no longer taxed. This lawsuit could finally break the back of the federal gun registry.
And it’s long overdue.
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