The Liberty Daily 
(The Daily Caller)—Regulations on suppressors and other items covered under the National Firearms Act could be halted after Democrats take control of Congress in January.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) released guidelines on Oct. 9 on items no longer covered under the National Firearms Act (NFA), noting that state and local rules remained unchanged in the aftermath of a ruling handed down on Aug. 5 by United States District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, striking down the NFA requirements on the grounds that the reduction of the transfer tax to $0 in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act rendered the registration and processing requirements of the NFA unconstitutional. On Tuesday, though, multiple pro-Second Amendment Republicans lost races for the House and Senate to Democrats who generally support gun control in the South and Midwest, including flipping open seats in Iowa, North Carolina and Texas ,while ousting incumbents in Ohio, Kansas and South Carolina.
After the Senate parliamentarian struck language that removed those items from NFA’s purview during the passage of the July 2025 reconciliation bill, Congress reduced the taxes to $0. Gun-rights groups filed suits challenging the applicability of the law shortly after the legislation was signed.
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During a debate over a funding bill in January, Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy introduced an amendment known as SA 4159, which would restore the taxes and increase them to over $4,700 per item to reflect inflation since 1934.
In an October interview, Second Amendment Foundation Director of Legal Research and Education Konstadinos Moros told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the regulations could return if Congress reinstates the transfer tax or if an anti-Second Amendment administration takes power.
“This district court ruled that under the taxing power, the laws, the registration requirements are unconstitutional. DOJ did not appeal. So because of that, and they didn’t appeal and they’ve announced that they’re basically not going to enforce this as per the ATF guidance,” Moros told the DCNF. “But if President Newsom or whoever takes office in 2029, he could tell ATF, ‘Nope, get back to enforcing this. We’re going to try and overturn this district court ruling.’”
“You can enforce it in another part of the country even, and we’ll fight it out in court and then the battle just resumes in a few years,” Moros continued. “And it’s unclear, you know, if we were to then lose, what would happen with these, all these suppressors and SBRs and everything else that got sold. If I had to predict, there probably would be some sort of grace period, like they’d give everyone 90 days to get them registered, you know, before they resumed enforcement.”
