House Passes Reconciliation Bill Removing Suppressors From the NFA

After huge amounts of the usual political sturm und drang, the House of Representatives passed the Big Beautiful Bill early this morning. That, in and of itself, isn’t really news. This is the reconciliation bill that, among many other things, makes permanent the tax cuts that were passed during Trump 1.0. If the bill fails, taxes would rise significantly on virtually everyone. Passing the bill is the only prayer Republicans have of holding onto the House in 2026.

The news for readers here, however, is what else was included in the bill. The final version doesn’t just zero out the $200 tax stamp on suppressor purchases as earlier versions did. The final version removes silencers entirely from regulation under the National Firearms Act.

What’s fun is the fact that the gun control lobby had spend the last two weeks issuing hair-on-fire, sky-is-falling email blasts and press releases warning that the NFA — with its fingerprints, background checks, and registration mandate –was actually useless. It was the $200 tax, they claimed, that was keeping us all safe from silent assassins preying upon us all. It seems that legislators heard that message and decided, ‘Okay…we’d already decided to get rid of the $200 tax. If the NFA is useless, we might as well de-list suppressors altogether.”

Don’t pop any champagne corks yet. The B³ now moves to the Senate where they will put their own stamp on the legislation, changing it in ways we can’t possibly predict. Whatever comes out of the Senate will then have to be reconciled with the House version. Nothing happens until it happens.

Whatever. To get this far was a very big win, and one that few of us thought was actually possible. One that appears to have been the result of a lot of pro-gun orgs whipping up their membership who then burned up a lot of phones on Capitol Hill. We’ll be watching the process in the Senate, and so should you.