08/13/2026
With the recent Silencer Shop v. ATF ruling, there's a lot of talk surrounding what's going to happen with the NFA. I wanted to mention some talking points I don't hear enough, beyond "Shall Not Be Infringed" (which I entirely agree with).
Starting with suppressors, there's no explanation on record (that I could find) for why they got added to the NFA in the first place. Nearly 100 years later, the only thing that makes any sense is that it was about preventing poaching. In a time when people were starving.
They aren't even that quiet. Outside of subsonic .22LR, a suppressed centerfire rifle is still sitting around 130 to 140dB at the shooter's ear, and you still need to run ear protection. For fun, let's bring another federal agency into the mix: OSHA. Gunfire is impulse noise, and OSHA caps impulse noise at 140dB.
An unsuppressed rifle runs 160dB and up, so by the federal government's own workplace requirements, a suppressor would have to be mandatory issue for not only law enforcement, but the military as well (this is understanding that both fall outside OSHA's purview).
As for short barrels, no matter the platform, short barreled rifles and shotguns are on paper less dangerous than their "full length" counterparts. A shorter barrel gives the powder less time to burn, so you lose velocity, and with it energy and effective range. A 10.3" 5.56 gives up somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 400 feet per second against a 16". With shotguns it's the pattern. Short barrels are cylinder bore with nothing holding the shot together, so buckshot opens up faster and less predictably and the effective range drops off accordingly.
There's also United States v. Miller. Per the "Miller Test", as I'll call it, the question is whether the weapon, by classification, is ordinary military equipment. Miller was measured against what the military fielded in 1939, and obviously what the military uses has changed substantially since then. The standard issue M4 has a 14.5" barrel while the NFA cutoff for a rifle is 16". 14" shotguns are in regular use, while the NFA cutoff is 18". While suppressors aren't standard issue to all servicemembers, they're issued enough that they'd be considered common use; at least the argument could be made. Which would mean the NFA would have to be revised entirely.
Beyond Miller, there's the separate Common Use argument under District of Columbia v. Heller, which looks at civilian ownership rather than military issue.
At the end of the day, beyond being unconstitutional, the NFA is all but unenforceable. I've been part of the industry for a decade and I've met hundreds of people who don't even know the National Fi****ms Act exists, or that they've got felonies sitting in their safe. And regardless of how you feel about fi****ms as a whole, it's absolutely absurd that Joe Schmoe can go to jail for longer than a child molester because he put a stock on his 10" AR pistol.
