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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23906 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Some (potentially) big news in the gun world just happened, and I'm surprised @gattsuru hasn't already beaten me to the punch with a thoroughly researched and detailed novel: https://saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/TX-NFA-opinion.pdf

A federal district court just ruled that short barreled rifles, short barreled shotguns, and suppressors no longer need to be registered under the National Firearms Act (NFA). I need to dig through the ruling and see if AOWs are covered as well before I go put a vertical foregrip on one of my pistols. The gist of their reasoning is that the constitution allows the federal government to tax, and since congress recently changed the amount of the tax for several NFA items down to $0, the accompanying registration requirement is no longer constitutional since it is not part of a tax.

Thanks to recent changes in how injunctions work, this ruling currently only applies to the plaintiffs. But the plaintiffs are the Second Amendment Foundation and Gun Owners of America, so if you're a member of either you are covered by the ruling. Also several red states joined the ruling as plaintiffs so if you're a resident of those states you're covered as well.

Big caveat: the ruling doesn't take effect for a week, pending appeal. Also good luck finding too many gun store or other retailers willing to sell you these items until any and all legal questions around them are resolved more permanently (see the guy in California who got prosecuted for buying a standard capacity magazine during "freedom week" for an example of why).

Other than my own personal excitement over this as a gun nut (going to finally get a suppressor for my .308), I'm tentatively excited about this ruling as possible proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left and there may be a possible future for conservatism (that doesn't require global economic collapse and/or nuclear war first). There's a decent chance this gets destroyed in an appeal, so I won't get my hopes up too much, but it's a strong sign of some real vitality in at least some sectors of the right that are still able to fight against the constant drift towards both the left and collectivism.

EDIT: After checking the ruling it appears AOWs are NOT covered as well.

To my surprise, the ATF have not requested a stay, and the injunction has gone into effect. It's pretty complicated what it actually does -- there's separate layers of party membership, other unenjoined federal laws, and a number of state prohibitions -- but there are at least some people able to buy or manufacture silencers today.

It's not clear whether the ATF will appeal.

Yeah, I've been waiting for the ATF/DOJ to publish updated guidance so that FFLs can just start selling this stuff without worrying about the hammer coming down on them.

I finally bought a GOA membership even though I'm in a plaintiff state just to be extra safe, didn't want to have to worry about the dogshooters when I printed a can for my 22lr

Exciting! I’ve seen silencer shop around, but I didn’t realize they had cases in the works. I would very much like to get a can for .22 if nothing else.

That said…I didn’t think constitutional challenges worked like this. Does Congress cite the 16th amendment before laying out Title 26? If not, does the whole edifice of tax law evaporate? This is probably good enough for the 5th Circuit, but I would not expect the Supreme Court to buy it.

On the gripping hand, I’m not sure how much faith I have in a legal team which struggles to use conjunctions. Schoolhouse Rock, guys.

The commerce clause bit not as weak as it looks: the NFA lacks an interstate nexus prong (and people have been convicted for purely in-state manufacture), which is pretty close to Lopez, and there's binding SCOTUS precedent that the law was set up under the taxing power (to avoid regulatory taking rulings) and specifically lower courts "will not undertake, by collateral inquiry as to the measure of the regulatory effect of a tax, to ascribe to Congress an attempt, under the guise of taxation, to exercise another power denied by the Federal Constitution."

In practice, this is the sort of case that gets a Roberts Special.

NFIB v. Sebelius would have gone quite differently under the current court I think. A court where Robert’s is the 4th most conservative justice is very different than where he’s the 6th

SilencerShop is great, they make a semi-complex process very easy. But I wonder if they are hurting their own business model/differentiator by getting suppressors off the NFA. Good for them in any case.

I can't imagine why or how. I saw suppressor sales with regularity that broadcasted '200$ off' in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge to the NFA tax. If anything, they should be salivating at the notion of finally getting access to the customer base that didn't want to bother filling out all the necessary forms - everything I've seen in that arena, even before the 0$ tax stamp, has been a push to make purchasing suppressors less and less troublesome for anyone involved.

If this holds up(in the few years it'll take to make it way through the courts), I'm looking forward to the surge of 3d printed supressor sales that'll follow.

Registering a prediction that silencers are, in the end, generally legal- but machine guns remain highly restricted. Very possible the supreme court rules that the hughes amendment can stand on its own while the NFA is unconstitutional.

But, uh, conservatives get policy wins all the time. School choice, abortion restrictions, right to carry, the list goes on and on. If you are a based white nationalist and expect white nationalism as a policy win you will be disappointed more often than not, but there's lots of conservative policy W's recently.

What's your prediction on SBRs and SBSs? I feel like SBRs will probably get legalized because pistol braces have already made them de facto legal, but we'll see some kind of weird, made-up exception for shotguns.

My prediction is short barreled rifles get legalized because nobody really cares about them, any other weapon gets legalized, but short barreled shotguns and high caliber rifles have some BS made up to restrict them.

I'm tentatively excited about this ruling as possible proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left

I'll be more excited about it when SCOTUS agrees, but I think that there is already ample proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left. School choice and right-to-carry/open-carry being big examples.

The thing is that "state passes school choice bill, parents use it" or "state passes right-to-open-carry bill, thousands NOT killed" aren't really gripping headlines.

Yeah the Cthulhu swims left idea only seems true to online rightists because their particular hobby-horses are usually the ones with the least support among the right wing broadly. I think it’s mostly a conservative blue-triber issue.

I do think there's some truth to this, although I am interested in your unpacking the "conservative blue-triber" angle a bit more.

It's also very frustrating for me because people often treat succeeding at shaping law and culture as sort of mysterious, which it really isn't - there are actually concrete things you can do that, while not a guarantee, make it more likely that you will succeed in shaping culture and law! And the idea of "Cthulhu only swims left," while it has some usefulness, can quickly become a "as an iron law of nature, the right always loses" and that's neither true nor helpful (except for the left).

Thanks for covering this; I've had a bit of a busy day.

I wouldn't buy the AOW yet, unless you want to be a volunteer.

The Jensen plaintiffs lack Article III standing to challenge the NFA’s regulation of “any other weapon”—the final, defined group of miscellaneous firearms—because they did not establish as much from the start of the case. The Court also declines to issue the requested declaratory judgments because they would provide no further relief... The Court’s permanent injunction does not extend to the NFA’s regulation of AOWs as it relates to the Jensen plaintiffs, as those plaintiffs lack standing with respect to those firearms...

So it's unconstitutional by this judge's opinion, but it won't be covered in this case's final order, and will depend on a future case to be a holding or subject of an injunction. Any charges brought in the future make it more likely to be challenged, but they don't guarantee that it'll end up before the same judge, and this case so far happened at a low enough level that it doesn't bind other courts.

((This case is also going to be appealed and the district court's order stayed. 1 isn't a probability, but this is so close that it's hard to deny.))

The general rule is that all pro-gun rulings are limited and fleeting and have no practical effect; all anti-gun ones are lasting and build the basis for further restrictions. So there are two immediate possibilities: the ruling will be stayed pending appeal. Or, the government will not appeal it, and, like the earlier post office ruling, it will be limited to only the plaintiffs. The way that would work is SAF and GoA members would be able to sell such weapons to each other and the government would be enjoined from stopping them, but no one else could and further SAF and GoA would no longer have standing in a broader challenge.

Hardly seems true given that the last few years have been constant 2A wins at SCOTUS. For an area of law that basically didn’t exist prior to 2008, it’s going extremely well. Have there been any major SCOTUS 2A losses ever? I guess the about sbs in the 30s? The interstate commerce ones that allow regulating them I suppose, but given that everything is interstate commerce I think that barely counts.

Lots of cases on felons and firearms and sentencing, but few people are really committed to letting felons have guns, and it’s pretty unlikely that it was intended by the founders anyway.

Sure, there are court wins, but has that translated into legal guns are actually getting purchased or CCW permits being issued in DC, Chicago or NYC?

No, but most legal issues where there’s a huge split between states desire to do something and SCOTUS go on for quite some time. If the courts weren’t continuing to take up gun cases I’d be worried, but Roberts is enough of an institutionalist that it seems like he’s going to keep striking down state laws until the line of “this is the absolute constitutional maximum you can regulate firearms” gets found and all the liberal states stick to that line. Going from “no personal right to firearm ownership” to litigating the specific types of weapons that can’t be banned or the circumstances one can be carried on the person is a lot of progress in 18 years frankly.

People point to progressive wins like Roe and Obergefell as these inevitable conservative losses when those issues were fought for way longer than to get to the SCOTUS case. And Roe got overturned after only 50 years, after over 70 years of activists agitating to legalize it!

As an aside, abortion was less of a blatantly progressive win when Roe came around, supported most strongly by Southern Evangelicals along with California and New York. It was primarily a Southern Democrat stance and seen as a liberty issue more than what it is now.

People point to progressive wins like Roe and Obergefell as these inevitable conservative losses when those issues were fought for way longer than to get to the SCOTUS case.

When Roe hit, people in Red states were able to secure abortions. When Obergefell hit, homosexuals in red states were able to get married. We are now many years and many victories past that point on guns, and none of these victories have actually allowed people in Blue states to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, even in many cases the people who specifically won their cases in the Supreme Court. Further, the court has shown a worryingly consistent habit of backing down from or dodging cases addressing the issue, often rejecting cases with much stronger facts in support of the second amendment, in favor of cases with much weaker facts.

I used to believe that the Constitution was whatever five justices said it was. Now it is evident that it is not even that. We have tested the question of whether the Supreme Court can get a decision Blue Tribe doesn't like to stick. It cannot.

Hardly seems true given that the last few years have been constant 2A wins at SCOTUS.

No. These "wins" have been carefully circumscribed to have no effect. You can theoretically get a carry permit in blue states, but they've taken advantage of the hedging and loopholes to make it so even if you do, you'll end up violating one of many of the vast "sensitive areas" which makes you a felon. SCOTUS stuck a footnote in Bruen which allowed the blue states to keep their prior-restraint permitting regimes fully intact, so I still can't buy a gun in New Jersey (or any other state, because the NFA is still intact) nor could I carry if I had one.

I agree that the states are fighting tooth and nail on this one, and progress is slow-going, but it’s slowly moving towards a more favorable legal environment and certainly isn’t moving to a more restrictive one, at least overall nationally. For an issue that isn’t particularly popular and is extremely unpopular among the educated and wealthy, that’s doing pretty good.

Second Amendment Foundation link

RECAP link with other court documents

Thanks!

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