Some on our side bitched that eliminating a 91-year excise tax on these items somehow isn’t really a win and that we should castigate our allies in Congress for failing to remove registration entirely.
To make the necessary upgrades to handle the law change, they’re going to shut the eForms system down for Form 1 and Form 4 submissions after Christmas to let their geeks get to work.
That the NFA can no longer be justified as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power on suppressors, SBRs and SBSs and is thus unconstitutional should be the end of this matter.
The law should be simple: if you can lawfully own a firearm, you should be able to own a suppressor, an SBR, or SBS without begging for government approval or paying for a permission slip that no longer even collects revenue.
The Second Amendment doesn’t include an asterisk that reads, “Void during budget disagreements.” Yet that’s precisely the downstream effect government shutdowns have on the firearm industry.
Adamiak’s case is the first time the ATF has ever charged anyone with violating the NFA for a bunch of legal gun parts. Unless action is taken quickly, based on ATF’s own sordid history, it won’t be the last.
Yesterday ATF published a laundry list of proposed changes to NFA form in the Federal Register and among them is removal of the CLEO notification mandate.
If they can strip suppressors of constitutional protection, what’s to stop them from doing the same with magazines, triggers, or optics? Once they declare something “nonessential,” the floodgates open for regulation, registration, and confiscation.
The complaint asserts that, with the removal of the excise tax on constitutionally protected arms like suppressors and SBRs, the NFA registration regime can no longer be upheld as a legal exercise of Congress’s taxing power.
If the administration is serious about keeping its promises, it must stop fighting against the People’s rights and abandon its defense of these immoral and unlawful restrictions.
