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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
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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.
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