The 1934 National fIrearms act

This article is for general information only and isn’t legal advice. Firearms law, including NFA classification, tax rates, and state-level restrictions, changes regularly and is currently the subject of active federal litigation that could alter parts of what’s described here. Confirm current requirements directly with ATF, your state’s statutes, and a qualified firearms attorney before making a purchase or build decision.

For 91 years, the National Firearms Act has sat there mostly untouched. Same $200 tax stamp since 1934. Same registration process. Same wait. For 91 years, it’s also been one of the most misunderstood federal laws. Then, on January 1, 2026, the federal tax on most NFA items dropped to zero for the first time in the law’s history. If you own a suppressor, you’re building an SBR, or you’re eyeing a stock instead of a brace on your pistol chassis, this is the first year in nearly a century where the math on that decision has actually changed.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 didn’t originate from a policy session or a congressman’s pet project. It came out of a specific, bloody stretch of American history. Prohibition-era gangland violence, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, and the attempted assassination of president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 all fed directly into Congress’s decision to act. The National Firearms Act’s own legislative history, as ATF describes it, makes it clear the goal wasn’t really about collecting revenue. It was about making certain firearms functionally impossible to obtain.

Something most people don’t realize is that the NFA is written into the tax code, not the criminal code. It lives in the Internal Revenue Code, (26 U.S.C. Chapter 53), because in 1934 Congress didn’t have a clean constitutional path to simply ban machine guns and sawed-off shotguns outright. What it did have was the power to tax. So lawmakers built a $200 excise tax on the making and transfer of specific firearms, plus a separate occupational tax on anyone in the business of dealing them, and required every one of those firearms to be registered with the Treasury Department under a new set of federal registration requirements. $200 in 1934 dollars is equivalent to about $5,000 in 2026. When a run-of-the-mill shotgun could be bought for around $20 in 1934, a $200 tax wasn’t just a fee; it was a financial barrier that very few Americans could get over.

Major Definitions Within the NFA Worth Knowing

A few terms within the National Firearms Act carry specific legal weight and are worth understanding before you go any further.

Firearm

For NFA purposes, “firearm” doesn’t mean every gun. It means the specific regulated categories below, plus mufflers and silencers.

Making or Manufacturing

Within the NFA, “making” or “manufacturing means creating an NFA firearm yourself, which is what an ATF Form 1 covers.

Transfer

Moving a registered NFA firearm from one owner to another, which is what ATF Form 4 covers.

The National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record

The National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, or NFRTR, is the master federal database where every legally registered NFA firearm in the country lives. As of ATF’s own reporting, it currently holds registrations for well over 6.4 million silencers, more than 1.1 million short-barreled rifles, and roughly 206,000 short-barreled shotguns.

Special Occupational Tax (SOT)

SOT is the annual tax paid by dealers and manufacturers who deal in NFA firearms as a business, on top of the FFL they already hold. Businesses and individuals who pay it are referred to as Special Occupational Taxpayers, and the tax itself is separate from the per-item making tax or transfer tax paid by an individual buyer.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

Everyones favorite federal agency, the ATF is the agency inside the Department of Justice that administers and enforces the NFA today. It sat inside the Treasury Department until 2003, when its firearms authority moved to DOJ under the Homeland Security Act.

The 1934 law covered five categories

1. Shotguns with barrels under 18 inches
2. Rifles with barrels under 18 inches
3. Machine guns
4. Firearm mufflers and silencers
5. Any other weapons (what we know today as “AOWs”)

The “any other weapon” portion of things comes about from a very narrow definition of “firearm” that was in the statute.

“ The term “Firearm” means a shotgun or rifle having a barrel or length, or any other weapon, except of less than eighteen inches in length, or any other weapon except a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machine gun, and includes a muffler or silencer for any firearm whether or not such firearm is included within the foregoing definition”  

Attorney General Homer Cummings, one of the NFA’s drafters originally wanted to regulate pistols and revolvers just as strictly as machine guns (as did several other people involved in the bill). Congress removed ordinary handguns from the bill before final passage, but left “any other weapon” broad enough to catch anything concealable that wasn’t a conventional pistol or revolver.

The category of “Destructive Devices” wasn’t part of the original NFA and wasn’t added until 30 years later with the Title II of the Gun Control Act of 1968. We’ll talk more about each category later, but the important takeaway from these original five categories is that these represented the most concerning types of firearms to lawmakers and are still the backbone of the National Firearms act as we know it today.

The 1934 National Firearms Act is the “mother law” that pretty much every major firearms law has originated from. There’s several reasons why the NFA became the “primordial soup” for federal firearms laws, but chief among them is that Congress quickly realized that the structure of the FFA worked when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government in 1937 with Sonzinsky v. United States, the first real challenge to the NFA (more about that below).

The NFA and it’s initial victory in court gave Congress a solid legal template: build a regulatory framework, run it through the tax code, and courts won’t “look behind the curtain” at the real motive as long as the law produces some actual revenue and Congress had the constitutional authority to tax the activity in the first place. The Supreme Court said (almost verbatim) that it wouldn’t “speculate” about the “hidden motives” behind a tax, even in a case where everyone involved, including the Justices, understood the real goal was to restrict a behavior Congress had no clean, direct constitutional path to simply ban. That’s not our personal interpretation of the case, that’s legitimately what the Supreme Court Opinion says.

The 1938 Federal Firearms Act was a fast follow to the NFA and it’s the reason the term Federal Firearms License (FFL) exists today. The FFA required anyone manufacturing, importing, or dealing in firearms to hold a federal license, mandated that those licensees keep records of who they sold to, and created the first federal list of people barred from buying guns. The FFA itself was repealed in 1968, but its core licensing structure didn’t disappear. It got folded into what came next.

Following assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr, Congress passed the GCA, which is the primary federal law governing who can buy a gun, who can sell one, and how firearms move across state lines. The GCA did a few major things.

• Repealed the 1938 Federal Firearms Act created the modern FFL system
• Required for the first time that every firearm made or imported in the U.S. have a serial number
• Shut down direct to consumer mail order sales (the rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald was ordered from a magazine ad)
• Set the federal age minimums of 18 to buy a rifle or shotgun and 21 to buy a handgun
• Created the concept of “prohibited persons” who cannot own firearms
• Introduced the “sporting purposes” test that restricted imports of cheap handguns (AKA “Saturday Night Specials” and military surplus rifles unless ATF determined they were suitable for hunting or competitive shooting.

President Lyndon Johnson actually wanted a national firearm registration and licensing for every gun owner, not just dealers, but that was stripped about before the bill passed.

The GCA had a significant impact on the NFA as we know it today as well. In early 1968, the US Supreme Court came to a decision in Haynes v. United States that forcing someone to register an NFA firearm they already possessed illegally violated their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, since registering it would be handing prosecutors a confession. Not surprisingly, the ATF did not like this and claimed that the ruling made the original 1934 NFA “virtually unenforceable”. We’ll cover Haynes in more detail in the legal challenges section, but he almost derailed the entire National Firearms Act. Title II of the GCA fixed the “loophole” by removing the registration requirement for people who already possessed unregistered firearms (there’s still no legal path to register an illegal unregistered NFA item today, for exactly this reason) and by barring the government from using an NFA application as evidence of a prior crime.

Title II also expanded the definition of “machine gun” to a much broader application. The 1934 NFA defined machine guns as “any weapon which which shoots, is designed to shoot, automatically or semiautomatically, more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

Title II of the GCA had 3 new additions to the definition of “machine gun”.

1. “Or can be readily restored to shoot.” If your machine gun is missing a part to make it operable or wasn’t permanently “deactivated”, it’s still a machine gun.
2. The bare frame or receiver of a machine gun is itself legally a machine gun, you don’t need a fully assembled weapon for it to count.
3. Any firearms part or set of parts “designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun” are considered machine guns. Even if it’s in an unopened box in the back of a closet. The same definition applies to a random pile of parts that could theoretically be assembled into an automatic weapon or convert a semi-auto weapon into full auto. This is why Glock switch = machine gun” today.

Title II also added the new NFA category of “Destructive Devices”, intended to cover things like hand grenades and explosive ordinance.

The Firearm Owners Protection Act (also known as the McClure-Volkmer Act) came about from the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) lobbying push against what gun owners saw as GCA overreach and allegations of abuse by ATF inspectors against FFL holders. A1982 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee report detailed claims that the ATF was repeatedly inspecting FLL holders purely for the purpose of harassment and drive them out of business and that 75% of ATF prosecutions “were aimed at ordinary citizens who had neither criminal intent nor knowledge, but were enticed by agents into unknowing technical violations.”

FOPA rolled back several GCA provisions like interstate sales of long guns on a limited basis, allowing ammunition to be shipped through USPS, barred the federal government from building a centralized registry of ordinary firearm dealer records, and limited how often ATF could inspect a dealer’s premises. FOPA was a 2 way street though.

Tucked into the same bill is the Hughes Amendment, which banned the transfer or possession of machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986, for anyone other than the government or existing licensed dealers and manufacturers. If you’ve ever wondered what a “pre ban” machine gun was or why they costs well over $10,000 (sometimes well over $100,000), this is why. That single clause is why a transferable, civilian-legal machine gun made before 1986 commands a premium and the same design manufactured a year later is off-limits to civilians entirely.

The Firearm Owners Protection Act also expanded the definition of “silencer” to include parts and kits intended for building one, not just a finished can.

Often known as “the Brady Act” or “the Brady Bill”, this law created the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the database an FFL checks every time you buy a firearm from them. NFA applications also run through an FBI-NICS check as part of ATF’s approval process and ride the same rails.

41F went into effect on July 13, 2016 to close a loophole with NFA firearms known as a the “gun trust loophole”. Before 41F, a trust or corporation could acquire an NFA item with no individual background check at all, since only the entity itself was vetted. After 41F, every “responsible person” tied to a trust, meaning anyone with the power to control, possess, or dispose of the firearm on the trust’s behalf, has to submit fingerprints, a photo, and a Responsible Person Questionnaire (ATF Form 5320.23), and go through the same background check an individual buyer does. The 41F also swapped out the old requirement for a Chief Law Enforcement Officer’s sign-off in favor of simple notification, meaning your local sheriff gets a copy of your application but no longer has veto power over it.

The Six NFA Categories

Contrary to popular belief, the NFA doesn’t regulate “scary guns” as a vague category. Nor does it regulate “assault rifles”. The NFA regulates 6 specific, defined types of firearms, and understanding exactly where the lines sit matters more than ever now that cost isn’t the barrier it used to be.

Machine Guns

Legally, a machine gun is any firearm that fires more than one round per single pull of the trigger, or any part designed to convert a semi-automatic firearm into one. This includes bare receivers as well. Because of the Hughes Amendment, civilians can only own ones manufactured and registered before May 19, 1986. The highly limited supply is exactly why prices have climbed the way they have.

Short Barreled Rifles (SBRs)

A short barreled rifle is a rifle with a barrel under 16 inches, or an overall length under 26 inches. This is the category most relevant if you’re building a compact AR-platform gun with an actual shoulder stock rather than a pistol brace.

Short Barreled Shotguns (SBSs)

Short barreled shotguns follow the same logic as SBRs. An SBS is any shotgun with a barrel under 18 inches, or an overall length under 26 inches.

Suppressors

Also called silencers, and defined in the statute using the older term “muffler”, a suppressor is any device designed to muffle or diminish the report of a firearm. Contrary to the Hollywood version, a suppressor reduces noise, sometimes dramatically, but it doesn’t make a gunshot silent.

Destructive Devices

Destructive devices are a category that covers explosive, incendiary, or poison gas devices like grenades and bombs, plus certain large-bore firearms over .50 caliber. Most shotguns are specifically excluded from this because of language in law that states “except a shotgun or shotgun shell which the Secretary finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes.”

There are 3 shotguns the ATF has classified as “Destructive Devices” specifically by name. The Armsel Striker (also known as the South African Streetsweeper), the Sentinel Arms Striker-12 (essentially an American copy of the Armsel Striker with some modifications), and the Cobray/SWD Streetsweeper (an unlicensed clone of the Striker design). In the case of all 3 of these shotguns weren’t classified because of bore size but because of the “weight, size, bulk, designed magazine capacity, configuration, and other factors indicate these are military-type shotguns, not sporting ones”. Interestingly, The Saiga-12, an AK-pattern semi-auto 12-gauge with detachable box magazines, looks and functions a lot like the USAS-12 in practical terms remains a non NFA shotgun, despite rumors that AFT might reclassify it by name at one point.

Any Other Weapon (AOW)

AOWs are the catch-all category, and the one people understand the least. Any Other Weapon covers concealable firearms that don’t neatly fit the “pistol” or “rifle” mold, things like smoothbore pistols built to fire a shotgun shell, combination shotgun-rifle barrels between 12 and 18 inches, and disguised firearms like pen guns or cane guns. The AOW category specifically excludes ordinary pistols and revolvers with a rifled bore, which is why the handguns at your local shop aren’t NFA items.

The NFA categories have created significant confusion in the PDW community over the years. Anyone building a pistol based PDW has (or has had) the potential to drift from perfectly legal firearm into SBR or AOW territory. Since 2006 the ATF has held the position that installing a vertical foregrip on a handgun takes it out of the legal definition of “pistol,” because a pistol is defined in part as a firearm designed to be held and fired with one hand. Once you add a vertical fore grip, ATF’s position is that you’ve “made” an AOW, which requires its own Form 1 registration before you ever attach the grip. Up until recently, there was a major gray area around whether or not a pistol brace could turn a pistol into an SBR as defined by the NFA, though that is largely put to rest now.

If you’re building a pistol chassis system, know what’s classified as a forward grip versus a handstop or foregrip-shaped accessory rail, because ATF draws that line based on function and design, not on what you call the part.

Legal Challenges To The NFA

The NFA has been in and out of federal court since barely three years after it passed,. The law has been challenged often and repeatedly by everyone from ordinary citizens to convicted felons and major gun rights organizations like the NRA. The current fight over the NFAs constitutionality is arguably the most serious one it’s faced in almost ninety years.

Major Legal Fights Against The NFA

Sonzinsky v. United States (1937)

The first real test for the NFA came just 3 years after it was passed from a firearms dealer named Sonzinsky, who argued the NFA’s dealer tax wasn’t really a tax at all, just a penalty dressed up to look like one, and therefore outside Congress’s constitutional authority. The Supreme Court disagreed. It held that because the tax produced real revenue and Congress gets to choose what to tax, courts shouldn’t second-guess the “hidden motives” behind a tax law, even when everyone involved knows the real goal is to restrict the taxed activity. That reasoning, that the NFA survives specifically because it functions as a tax, is the exact thread that current lawsuits are now trying to pull.

United States v. Miller (1939)

The United States v. Miller is the case every Second Amendment argument eventually runs into because from 1939 until District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, Miller was literally the sole Supreme Court decision interpreting what the Second Amendment actually means, and the backstory is one of the strangest on record .

In 1938 Jack Miller and Frank Layton were arrested for transporting an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines from Oklahoma to Arkansas. Both Miller and Layton tried to plead guilty, but the judge, Heartsill Ragon, refused to accept their plea. The lawyer assigned to Miller and Layton argued that the NFA violated the Second and Tenth Amendments. Surprisingly Judge Ragon actually agreed with them that the NFA violated the Second Amendment and threw out the indictment. Less than 6 months later, Miller and Layton were both re-indicted on the same charge, they made the same argument that the NFA violated the Second Amendment, and again Ragon agreed, dismissing the indictment.

The government appealed straight to the Supreme Court. Neither Miller nor his lawyer showed up to argue the case, reportedly because Miller couldn’t or wouldn’t pay him, so the Court heard only the government’s side. The Court ruled that without evidence a short-barreled shotgun had “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” the Second Amendment didn’t protect it. Miller never found out how the case ended. He was found dead in a dry creek bed near Chelsea, Oklahoma on April 4th, 1939 with 4 gunshot wounds from .38. His death is considered connected to his history as a small-time criminal and “snitch”. Though someone was charged, no one was ever convicted of Miller’s murder.

Jack Miller it turns out, was no stranger to Judge Ragon who had also been the sentencing judge on a case prior in which Jack Miller had been federally indicted along with several others for the May 3rd, 1935 robbery of the City National Bank of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Miller turned state’s evidence and told federal prosecutors everything he knew in exchange for total immunity. Then the gang that Miller helped put away with his testimony escaped before sentencing and when eventually caught, it was Heartsill Ragon was who sentenced them.

Ragon was a vocal supporter of federal gun control who didn’t actually think the NFA violated the Second Amendment. He did know that the federal government needed a Supreme Court precedent that federal gun control did not violate the Second Amendment. By ruling that the NFA did violate it, Ragon was setting up the perfect the situation for an appeal to the Supreme Court and he also knew that more likely than not, Miller was not going to pay a lawyer to argue his case again, he was already free and needed to lay low. The Supreme Court almost immediately accepted the appeal against Ragon’s ruling, and thus a precedent was established that federal gun control was indeed constitutional.

Haynes v. United States (1968)

Haynes v. United States created one of the most legitimate challenges to the NFA that genuinely scared the ATF. Miles Edward Haynes was a convicted felon from Texas who was indicted in 1965 for being in possession of an unregistered short-barreled shotgun, a single shot .410 that had a barrel length of 12 5/16 inches and with the stuck cut off had an overall length of 20 3/8 inches. The government charged him with three counts under the NFA. Two got dropped by the prosecutor’s own motion before trial. The one that stuck was possession of an unregistered firearm under § 5851 (Possessing firearms illegally). Prior to the start of the trial, Haynes filed a motion to dismiss his charges, arguing that the NFA registration requirements violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The trail court rejected his motion and Haynes almost immediately plead guilty. Lucky for Haynes, his lawyer, Charles Alan Wright, was one of the most respected federal court minds of the time.

Under the original 1934 National Firearms Act, if you possessed an NFA firearm that had never been registered, the law put the registration duty on you, the person who had possession of it, not just on whoever made or sold it. This left Haynes with two options, neither of them good.

One, register the gun, which meant filling out a federal form that amounted to a signed confession of “I currently possess this unregistered sawed-off shotgun, and I’m a felon who isn’t allowed to have a firearm at all.”

Two, don’t register the shotgun, and be guilty of the exact crime he was charged with.

His argument was that there was no way to comply with the law without confessing to a crime in the process, which violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The US Supreme Court agreed this was indeed a constitutional violation and reversed Haynes’s conviction. The registration requirements of the NFA could compel self-incrimination. This ruling invalidated the requirement for registration of pre-existing NFA firearms completely.

The US government was not pleased with this outcome, to the say the least. The federal government tried to then create a middle ground that was essentially “we’ll let people register NFA firearms, but registering a previously unlicensed NFA firearm can’t be used as evidence of a crime”. The Supreme Court rejected this option as well. The ATF was now in crises mode. In their own words “The Haynes decision made the 1934 Act virtually unenforceable.”

Congress quickly found a solution to this through Title II of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Title II removed the requirement that a possessor personally register an already-unregistered NFA firearm and legally barred registration information from being used as evidence of a prior offense. Because of Haynes and Title II, to this day, there is no legal path to register an illegal, unregistered NFA firearm/item.

United States v. Freed (1971)

United States v. Freed was the first major NFA challenge after Title II and was a major win for the US government. This decision found that Congress’s changes to the NFA in 1968 removed any Fifth Amendment issues and for all intents and purposes, “fixed” the registration issue. The case came about when Donald Freed and Shirley Jean Sutherland were indicted for “possessing and conspiring to possess unregistered hand grenades, under the amended NFA (26 U.S.C. § 5861(d))” . A federal district court in California dismissed the indictments against Freed and Sutherland on the grounds the new NFA registration requirements still violated the Fifth Amendment and because the charges did specifically allege that Freed and Sutherland knew the grenades were unregistered.

The government appealed straight to the Supreme Court and won. The Court found that the new registration process was constitutional because the transferor (seller) has to complete the registration and pay the tax, not the transferee (buyer). The transferee/buyer only has give fingerprints and photograph, and once doing so, the NFA items are now legal. No incriminating statements in the process. More importantly, the Court also found that to be guilty of an NFA violation the government does not have prove that you knew the firearm was unregistered. The government has to prove you knowingly possessed the items, and that you knew what those items were, not that you knew they were unregistered. Whether or not you knew the registration status of the NFA item is completely immaterial.

Staples v. United States (1994)

On December 29, 1989, in Jenks, Oklahoma, police officers and ATF agents executed a search warrant at the home of Harold Staples. Staples never challenged the validity or basis of the search warrant, so there’s no formal public record of why his home was searched in the first place. During the search, ATF agents found an AR-15 rifle that had been modified to fire automatically by filing down the metal stop that prevented the selector switch from moving to “full auto” and had several M-16 parts including “M-16 selector switch and several other M-16 internal parts, including a hammer, disconnector, and trigger“.

ATF agents testified that when test fired, the rifle fired multiple rounds with a single trigger pull. Staples testified that he had no idea the rifle could do that and so far as he knew, the rifle could only fire at a semiautomatic rate and even then it barely worked because of frequent jams. Staples was found guilty of possessing an unregistered machine gun and sentenced to 5 years probation and a $5,000 fine.

Staples appealed his conviction and the US Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in his favor. The Court found that the government has to prove a defendant knew their gun had the specific characteristics that made it an NFA firearm, not just that they knowingly possessed a gun in general. Staples v. United States is the reason “your honor, I didn’t know it was full auto” is a legitimate, legally recognized defense today, that saved more than a few people from conviction.

Current Legal Challenges To The NFA

When the $200 NFA tax went away, gun rights organizations didn’t waste any time in brining new challenges against the NFA. Starting in August 2025, 3 separate lawsuits, backed by a coalition that includes the Second Amendment Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and the American Suppressor Association, were filed making essentially the same argument that was started almost 90 years ago with Sonzinsky v. United States.

• Brown v. ATF (Eastern District of Missouri, filed August 2025)
• Jensen v. ATF (Northern District of Texas, filed October 2025)
• Roberts v. ATF (Eastern District of Kentucky, filed February 2026)

If the Supreme Court upheld the NFA’s registration scheme in 1937 with Sonzinsky v. United States specifically because it operates “in aid of” a valid tax, what happens once that tax is set to zero for an entire category of firearms?

The plaintiffs argued the constitutional floor just fell out from under the registration requirements themselves, since there’s no longer any tax left to be “in aid of,” and that no other Article I power, including Congress’s authority over interstate commerce, fills the gap. A member of Congress made essentially the same argument on the House floor, writing to the Attorney General that “you cannot have a registration of the tax paid on a firearm when there is no tax.” The Department of Justice disagrees, and as of mid-2026 these cases remain unresolved, working through briefing and oral argument.

United States v. Peterson

Separate from Brown, Jensen, and Roberts, a more procedural fight has been playing out at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals since 2022. George Peterson ran a firearms business called PDW Solutions, LLC, operated partly out of his own home in Louisiana. In the summer of 2022, the ATF was investigating PDW Solutions over allegations that it had sold firearms to people the ATF had reason to believe were prohibited persons, and that it completed sales without the required background checks.

When ATF agents executed the search warrant at Peterson’s home the found hey found a functioning homemade suppressor inside a bedroom closet safe. Peterson hadn’t bought it from a manufacturer, he’d built it himself from a kit. It had no serial number and had never been registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. Peterson was indicted for possessing an unregistered suppressor under the NFA (26 U.S.C. §§ 5841, 5861(d), and 5871).

Peterson moved to dismiss the charges on two separate grounds: that the NFA’s registration scheme violated his Second Amendment rights and that the search itself violated the Fourth Amendment. The district court denied both motions. Peterson then entered a conditional guilty plea (which allowed him to preserve his right to appeal) and was sentenced to 2 years in federal prison.

When Peterson appealed, the Fifth Circuit Court didn’t look at whether suppressors count as constitutionally protected “arms” at all, it just assumed they were, for the sake of argument. Instead the Court asked “is requiring registration okay, even for a protected arm? The Court said yes, because the NFA system works just like a the “shall-issue” concealed carry permit system that had already been approved by the Supreme Court. Anyone who applies and meets the requirements gets approved, it’s not left to an official’s discretion. Peterson lost because he’d never actually gone through that registration process, so he had no evidence the system was being run unfairly, only that it existed. Though Peterson lost his appeal, federal courts left the door open for a challenge from anyone who did have evidence the system was unfair.

United States v. Comeaux

Brennan James Comeaux, a Louisiana man, was arrested in June 2022 for unlawfully discharging a firearm. That arrest led to a search warrant on his home, where sheriff’s deputies found several firearms, what they suspected to be silencers, and other firearm accessories and equipment. The sheriff’s department brought in the ATF, who confirmed the devices met the legal definition of a silencer. Comeaux told an ATF agent directly that he’d made the silencers himself and a federal grand jury charged him with possessing an unregistered firearm (26 U.S.C. § 5861(d)) and possessing a firearm without a serial number (§ 5861(i)).

Comeaux filed a motion to dismiss, arguing both provisions of the NFA he was charged with violated the Second Amendment, facially and as applied to him. The district court denied the motion, reasoning that silencers are “dangerous and unusual weapons” and therefore not protected at all. Comeaux pleaded guilty to the unregistered-possession charge, reserving his right to appeal, and was sentenced to 24 months in prison plus 3 years of supervised release.

On June 18, 2026, the panel debating Comeaux’s appeal ruled that suppressors are protected “Arms” under the Second Amendment. The court’s reasoning was that a suppressor serves “critical functions that make firearms both safer and more effective for their core lawful purpose of self-defense“. The question that court didn’t want to address in Peterson’s appeal was now settled. Suppressors are considered protected “arms under the Second Amendment. This is a big deal for gun rights advocates for two reasons.

1. The court used to be able to pretty easily win any constitutional challenge involving a suppressor because they could just say “this isn’t a weapon, so there’s nothing to consider in terms of the Second Amendment.
2. This provides the framework for challenging and quite possibly overturning state level bans on suppressors. There are currently There are eight states plus Washington D.C. that ban civilian suppressor possession outright. It has already been established that the government can’t categorically ban an entire class of commonly possessed, constitutionally protected arms. That’s what overturned D.C.’s handgun ban. If suppressors stay confirmed as protected arms, a straight up ban would not be legal.

What Actually Happens If You Want to Buy an NFA Item Today

Buying an NFA firearm is a fairly straightforward process in 2026.

If you’re buying something already built by a manufacturer or dealer, your dealer files an ATF Form 4 on your behalf. If you’re building your own, say, cutting down a rifle barrel yourself or assembling your own suppressor, you file an ATF Form 1 to register it before you build it. Building first and registering after is a felony, full stop, even if you fully intend to register it eventually.

You can apply as an individual, or through a trust or legal entity. Since the 41F rule took effect in 2016, both routes require the same level of scrutiny including fingerprints, a passport-style photo, and a background check for every “responsible person” involved. The main advantage of a trust isn’t avoiding paperwork anymore, it’s that it allows multiple people (say, you and a spouse or family member) to legally possess the same item, where an individual registration limits legal possession to you alone.

No matter which form or application type you’re doing you’ll need an FD-258 fingerprint card (or a digital equivalent for eForms), a current photograph, and you’ll send a copy of your application to your local Chief Law Enforcement Officer. Since 41F, that’s a notification to local law enforcement, not a request for their sign-off.

Just like buying a firearm from your local store, your application goes through an FBI-NICS check as part of ATF’s review. If your background check comes back as “delayed,” the FBI works to resolve it. If your background check comes back “denied,” there’s a formal appeals process through both ATF and the FBI.

This is the part that frustrates NFA buyers the most. The ATF’s own published data for applications finalized in May 2026 showed the average processing was running 8 days for an individual eForm 4, 25 days for a trust eForm 4, and 62 days for an eForm 1. This can time frame can be impacted by any number of things and can change without notice, you should check with the ATF directly for the most up to date wait times. The May 2026 numbers reflect the aftermath of the January 1, 2026 surge, when the agency received over 200,000 applications in a single month. Check ATF’s current processing times page directly before you plan around any specific wait.

Once approved, your dealer or you (if self-made) can legally take possession. Not a second before. The waiting period is sometimes called “NFA jail,” where you have to keep all your parts locked up in separate areas. Having the parts to build an NFA item sitting next to each other, unregistered, can be treated as constructive possession of an illegal firearm, even without ever having assembled them.

PDWs can be one of the most confusing firearms when it comes to the NFA. There’s a lot of ambiguity about what can take a PDW from Title I to NFA and not a lot of clear guidance. A pistol chassis system that keeps the platform in its designed configuration, brace attached and used as a brace, no vertical fore grip, barrel length as manufactured, stays outside the NFA entirely. The moment you start modifying that configuration, swapping in an actual shoulder stock, cutting a barrel down, or adding a true vertical fore grip to a handgun-based platform, you’re potentially looking at an SBR or an AOW, and the classification turns on specific, sometimes technical details ATF has ruled on before, not on general intent.

If you’ve been holding off on registering a PDW build as an SBR purely because of the $200 cost, that specific reason is gone. The tax is zero. The paperwork, the wait, and the background check are exactly the same as they’ve always been, so the decision now comes down to whether you actually want the configuration, not whether you can afford the stamp. If your platform started life as a handgun and you’re considering hardware that functions as a true vertical fore grip rather than a handstop or angled foregrip, get the classification confirmed before you attach it

No matter what you want to do with your PDW build, you need to check your own state’s laws, current ATF guidelines. Nothing that we say here should be a substitute for your own legal research, rules at the federal, state, and even city level can change quickly and with little notice.

Common Misconceptions And Questions About The NFA and NFA Items