BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and its partners in a federal lawsuit challenging the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) have filed a motion for summary judgment in federal court in Texas.
The lawsuit is known as Jensen v. ATF. CCRKBA is joined by the Texas State Rifle Association, Hot Shots Custom LLC and three private citizens, David Lynn Smith, Jeremy Neusch and John Jensen, for whom the case is named. They are represented by attorneys R. Brent Cooper at Cooper & Scully in Dallas, and David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson and Nicholas A. Varone at Cooper & Kirk in Washington, D.C. The motion was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division.
As noted in the complaint, when the NFA was enacted 91 years ago, it established a $200 tax on certain classes of firearms and also created a registration requirement meant to facilitate the enforcement of the tax. The NFA was premised explicitly on Congress’ enumerated authority to “lay and collect taxes.” That constitutional basis, however, was recently eliminated with respect to the making, transferring, and receiving of several items that are defined as “firearms” by the NFA, including suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns because, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (“BBB”), Congress eliminated the making and transfer taxes on those items.
“That the NFA can no longer be justified as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power and is thus unconstitutional should be the end of this matter,” the motion states.
“The time has come to eliminate all of these previously-taxed items from regulation under the NFA,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “These continued restrictions amount to an unconstitutional regulatory scheme as they pertain to suppressors and short-barreled rifles under the Second Amendment. As we state in our motion, because suppressors and short-barreled rifles are neither ‘dangerous nor unusual,’ and because there is no tradition of requiring the registration and attendant regulation of protected arms, the NFA’s regulatory scheme is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment with respect to suppressors and short-barreled rifles.
“As the Supreme Court made clear in the 2022 Bruen ruling,” he added, “the Second Amendment presumptively protects the people’s right to keep and bear all arms, and the items affected by the BBB’s elimination of the tax qualify as arms, so they should no longer be subject to restrictive government regulation.”