Missouri Sues ATF Over NFA

Missouri's attorney general just told a federal court that ATF has no legal basis to keep registering suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and AOWs now that the tax on them is zero.

State of play: Catherine Hanaway filed suit against ATF and the Department of Justice, asking the court to permanently block enforcement of NFA registration requirements for those four item categories. The lawsuit follows Congress's move to cut the National Firearms Act's making and transfer taxes on suppressors, SBRs, SBSs, and AOWs down to $0.

The legal question: The NFA has survived constitutional challenges for nearly 90 years because courts treated it as a revenue-raising tax law, not a gun control statute in disguise. That's the holding from Sonzinsky v. United States back in 1937 — the Supreme Court upheld the NFA's registration and taxing scheme precisely because it functioned as a tax. Hanaway's suit argues that once Congress sets the tax at zero, that constitutional foundation disappears. No tax, no tax-collection justification, no basis for the registration and background-check machinery built around it.

Missouri's argument is straightforward: ATF is still requiring registration, fingerprints, photographs, and a months-long approval wait for items that no longer generate a dime of federal tax revenue. If the registry can't be justified as incidental to tax collection, the state contends, ATF is enforcing a naked federal gun registration scheme with no constitutional hook.

The intrigue: This isn't a Second Amendment challenge in the traditional sense. It's a structural argument aimed at the legal scaffolding that has protected the NFA since the New Deal era. If a court agrees the tax basis is gone, it could unravel registration requirements for an entire category of NFA items without touching Bruen or historical-tradition analysis at all.

Yes, but: ATF and DOJ will almost certainly argue that registration serves independent regulatory purposes — tracking, background checks, transfer oversight — separate from tax collection, and that Congress zeroing the tax doesn't erase the underlying statute's registration mandate. Federal courts have been reluctant to dismantle established NFA machinery, and this fight will likely take years and multiple appeals to resolve.

What to watch: Whether other states or gun rights groups file parallel suits, and how ATF responds in its answer to the complaint. A win for Missouri wouldn't automatically deregister existing NFA items nationwide, but it would put real pressure on ATF's authority to keep enforcing registration on suppressors, SBRs, SBSs, and AOWs going forward.

The bottom line: this suit tests whether a $0 tax can still support a federal firearms registry, and the answer could reshape how suppressors and short-barreled guns are regulated for good.