NFA

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Would There Have Been Ruby Ridge Without The NFA?

August 23, 2025 by 4 Comments

Thursday marked the 33rd anniversary of the beginning of the siege of the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge (Idaho). As most readers know, Randy Weaver had been charged with a violation of the National Firearms Act for selling shotguns with less than the mandated minimum length.

Photo from The Spokesman-Review

This leads to the headline question of whether there would have been a Ruby Ridge if there had been no NFA.

Yes and no.

Without the NFA and its prohibition on untaxed shortened shotguns, the original charges against Weaver would not have existed and the US Marshals Service would have had no reason to attempt to apprehend Weaver for missing his court date. That said, given the many attempts to entrap Weaver so he would be forced to be an informant against Aryan Nation and other white supremacists in Idaho, the Feds would have found something.

I don’t want to go into much about the history of these groups nor of the role of Federal law enforcement in their investigation and prosecution. Suffice it to say, agencies like the FBI and the BATFE were actively investigating these groups in Idaho, used undercover agents, and sought to entrap those who could provide more information on them. Randy Weaver was one such an individual and eventually was arrested for a violation of the NFA for selling two shotguns to an undercover agent who had befriended him in an attempt to gain information. In the later Federal trial after the siege, Weaver was acquitted of all charges except for the failure to appear for his court date. A later wrongful death lawsuit ended with an out of court settlement to the remaining Weaver family members for $3.1 million. This was for the deaths of Vicki and Sammy Weaver.

With this as background and without trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist, getting rid of the most onerous parts of the NFA will not stop the Deep State. That said, I think both the lawsuits against the NFA have legs. The latter of the two, Brown v. ATF, brought by a coalition of the NRA, Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, and the American Suppressor Association, appears to me to be the one with the most chance of success as it covers both the tax issue and the historical issues of gun control. We shall see.

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Plan B

June 28, 2025 by 3 Comments

Now that Senate Majority Leader John Thune has kowtowed to the Left’s Deep State Operative aka the Senate Parliamentarian on needed reform to the National Firearms Act, it is time for Plan B.

According to a text I received this morning from John Commerford, Executive Director of the NRA-ILA, the tax on silencers, short barreled rifles and shotguns, and any other weapons has been lowered to zero dollars in the text of the bill. Additionally, they will be exempted from the excise taxes of the Pittman-Robertson Act. However, all of these items will still be subject to all the laws and regulations of the National Firearms Act including registration. This also means you have to ask ATF for a “mother, may I” permission slip to cross state lines even temporarily with your short barreled rifle or shotgun. Silencers and AOWs are exempt from that requirement.

As my friend Miggy Gonzalez said on Facebook, “We were hoping for a free steak dinner, but we are getting a side of large fries for a Happy Meal instead.”

A coalition of the groups fighting for NFA reform which included the NRA, the American Suppressor Association, GOA, SAF, FPC, and others released this statement yesterday.

The bottom line is ain’t nobody that happy on our side of the fence while the other side is enjoying the fact that their Deep State Operative came through for them. That, and as Diamondback notes, John Thune is a “Temu knockoff of Mitch McConnell.” You would think that with how Elizabeth McDonough just dissed the entire GOP majority of the Senate Finance Committee that the Republicans might show more spine and less squishiness. A guy can dream, right?

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Lasswell, Animal House, Oliver Twist, And The Big Beautiful Bill

June 27, 2025 by 17 Comments

Harold Lasswell was one of the icons of political science of the 20th century. Not content to be one of the founding fathers of political psychology and policy sciences, he was one of the earliest to recognize that mass communications was worthy of scholarly study. Long before modern political science devolved into trendy genres like feminist theory, queer theory, and fill in the blank theory, Lasswell was studying propaganda and had invented content analysis to search for patterns within it.

Lasswell wrote over 30 books and somewhere near 250 scholarly journal articles. This is a massive output by any measure. That said, the one book that always caught my attention was an early work entitled, Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How. (#commission earned). This is because I have always had a Lasswellian view of politics at its most basic. It is about the fight by both the elites and the masses to see who gets the spoils along with the countervailing fight by their opponents to keep the spoils for themselves. You can gloss up politics with all sorts of theories but it always comes back to power and the spoils that come with it.

This morning we learned of the infuriating ruling by the Senate Parliamentarian, an appointed and not elected official, that the inclusion of parts of the Hearing Protection Act and the SHORT Act violated the so-called Byrd Rule. This was notwithstanding that the US argued that the National Firearms Act did not violate the Second Amendment because it was a “revenue measure” in US v Miller. The Parliamentarian, Elizabeth McDonough, argued the NFA was a regulation and not a tax which is utter bovine manure.

Making matters worse, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) who controls McDonough’s appointment has indicated he does not plan to challenge her ruling.

I see Thune as acting like Kevin Bacon’s character in the movie Animal House. What Thune seems to forget that he would not even be Senate Majority Leader if gun owners had not provided the margin of victory in key Senate races in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Montana.

The question is what to do now as well as what not to do. Gun owners should not do is be like Oliver asking for more. It is time we stop groveling!

The first thing we should be doing is calling our US Senators and letting them have it for kowtowing to the parliamentarian appointed by none other than Harry Reid. Call 202-224-3121 and ask for the offices of your two senators. Keep the pressure up and let them know that merely stripping the NFA reform provisions out of the Big Beautiful Bill is not going to cut it. Here is the list of those up for reelection in 2026. They should be the first targets of your call.

Here are the options as I and others see them:

  • Do nothing – definitely possible given the Senate
  • Fire Elizabeth McDonough – probably not going to happen
  • Have J. D. Vance overrule McDonough as President of the Senate – possible
  • Leave the regulatory aspects of the NFA in place and lower the tax to zero or $1 – wimpy but likely
  • Rewrite the provisions to try and get past the parliamentarian – maybe
  • Set the tax at $1 and preempt all the state’s that ban NFA items – suggested by Kostas Moros

Stephen Gutowski of The Reload thinks that McDonough will neither be fired nor overruled. His argument is that doing so may endanger the sacred tradition of the fillibuster.

While the Majority Leader can fire the parliamentarian or the Vice President can overrule their decisions, there are good reasons that’s happened so rarely. It all has to do with the filibuster. Since reconciliation is a special Senate process designed to allow budget bills to avoid the 60-vote filibuster threshold–but only budget bills. So, the process is designed to root out anything that doesn’t primarily have a budget impact.

In other words, the process is designed to protect the legislative filibuster.

He very well may be correct. Stephen goes on to add that if McDonough is overruled or fired by the Republicans it will be due to other items stripped out of the bill and not the NFA items. In other words, no matter how important these items are to the gun community – and they are – they just don’t seem that important to the Republican senators.

That is a perception that needs to be changed. The time for going before Congress on bended knee is over. Every 2A organization from the NRA to state level groups needs to mobilize their members to say hell no. As I said in the beginning referring to Harold Laswell, politics is who gets what, when, and how.

We know what we want and we know we want it now.

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Suppressor Steve

June 22, 2025 by 7 Comments

The Senate Finance Committee amendments are the best as they remove suppressors, short barreled rifles, short barreled shotguns, and any other weapons from the NFA. In addition, there is language that will satisfy state requirements requiring registration or licensing under the NFA.

 Call the U.S. Senate switchboard operator at (202) 224-3121 to connect with your state’s U.S. Senators – tell them once again to pass the Finance Committee’s firearm and related tax reforms in full.

As I have said from the beginning, you don’t get what you don’t ask for – or in this case, demand. While it may be more that we expect to get, we still should get something if only the suppressor portion.

PS: Regular blogging will resume. The Complementary Spouse and I just spent 9 days in Alaska seeing the sights and visiting my cousin Ginny.

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Prohibitionists Gotta Lie, Example 2

May 22, 2025 by

Our next example of prohibitionists lying about suppressors comes from the Cult of Personality known as Giffords.

Silencers, also known as “suppressors,” obstruct law enforcement efforts to quickly and effectively respond to active shooters since they make it more difficult to recognize the sound of gunfire and locate the source of gunshots. They also mask muzzle flash and reduce recoil, increasing the risk of multiple-casualty shootings. A silencer was used in the 2019 Virginia Beach shooting that killed 12 people. It has also been reported that the shooters in the 2022 Tops Friendly Market massacre in Buffalo, New York, and the 2023 Lewiston, Maine, shooting that murdered 18 people, had tried to purchase silencers, but were denied. 

“Instead of focusing on the safety of American families, House Republicans just gave gun industry CEOs a $1.5 billion tax break to help boost their bottom line. Silencers will only enable shooters to cause more violence and damage without being detected. Law enforcement has opposed efforts to make silencers more accessible for a reason—they’re dangerous and make their jobs harder. For a party that claims to ‘back the blue,’ House Republicans just gave dangerous people a big win and ignored the impact to public safety,” said GIFFORDS Executive Director Emma Brown. 

As I noted in my previous post, 130 decibels is the average of a suppressed gun shot from a 9mm Glock. That is the same amount of sound of a F-18 taking off from a carrier deck. More difficult to recognize the sound of gunfire? I don’t think so.

Reducing recoil and muzzle flash increase the risk of mass-casualty events? Are you kidding me? That has to be one of the more ludicrous arguments made by the prohibitionists.

Insofar as law enforcement opposing efforts to deregulate suppressors, the very article used by Giffords says just the opposite. It points out that the then head of the Fraternal Order of Police didn’t consider it a law enforcement problem. Using 7-8 year old articles regarding LEOs and suppressors to try and make your point just fails.

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“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

May 22, 2025 by 1 Comment

As Mick Jagger famously sung in the Rolling Stones’ classic hit:

No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you’ll find
You get what you need

The House of Representatives passed One Big, Beautiful Bill aka the budget reconciliation bill very early this morning. It passed 215-214 with 2 Republicans voting no and 1 voting present. Included in the bill was a provision that removed suppressors from the National Firearms Act.

We wanted to get both the Hearing Protection Act and the SHORT Act in the final bill as sent to the Senate. We only got the Hearing Protection Act provision which removed suppressors from the National Firearms Act.

Is this a loss?

The answer is an unequivocal no.

As any trader in a Third-World market would tell you, the bidding process begins by asking for more than you reasonably think you can get. By asking for both the HPA and the SHORT Act it gave us room to bargain. While we wanted both, getting suppressors removed from the National Firearms Act is much better than what the Ways and Means Committee was offering which was a reduction of the tax to zero but with suppressors remaining registered in the NFA. In my opinion, if we had started the negotiations with only asking for the Hearing Protection Act then we probably would have only gotten the reduction in tax.

Thanks to a post by the American Suppressor Association, here is the final wording that the House voted to approve.

This now goes to the Senate where we must fight to keep this provision in the bill. It, of course, has riled up the gun control industry but that was to be expected.

Provided this passes the Senate and suppressors are removed from the NFA in their entirety I expect to see an explosion in the sales of suppressors as well as court battles in those states like Illinois, New York, and California that ban suppressors. I look forward to the latter as it is hard to argue against something that reduces overall noise pollution and is backed as a health safety device by the medical community.

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An Open Letter To Reform NFA (Updated)

May 18, 2025 by 6 Comments

A number of state-level Second Amendment groups along with a few individuals have signed an open letter to Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) of the House Budget Committee and Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The letter demands the inclusion of portions of both the Hearing Protection Act (HR 404) and the SHORT Act (HR 2395) into the budget reconciliation bill.

The signatories represent constituencies from coast to coast and North to South. I expect more groups to sign on to this letter as the evening progresses. I find it remarkable that this many groups can come together to sign this letter in little more than a day and a half.

If you represent an organization that ought to be a signatory to this letter, you can contact Rep. J. R. Hoell of New Hampshire at RepJRHoell@gmail.com to add your name and organization.

The updated letter in its entirety is below:

HPA-Short Act letter 20250519 8pmDownload

The letter has been updated to add elected officials to the list. Signatories are still being added and it is not too late to add your name to the list.

As someone commented on Reddit, “Closed mouths never get fed.” Meaning if we don’t ask or demand it, we will never get either the SHORT Act or the HPA. We may not get all we want but we would get nothing if we didn’t ask for it.

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BOHICA – Pistol Brace Rule

January 13, 2023 by

We knew it was coming. Some had speculated it would be released during the SHOT Show. However, the weasel running the Department of Justice, Merrick Garland, decided to release the new pistol brace rule on the Friday before a long weekend. This is usually the case when you don’t want to make a big splash with an announcement.

In his press release, Garland said this:

“Keeping our communities safe from gun violence is among the Department’s highest priorities,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Almost a century ago, Congress determined that short-barreled rifles must be subject to heightened requirements. Today’s rule makes clear that firearm manufacturers, dealers, and individuals cannot evade these important public safety protections simply by adding accessories to pistols that transform them into short-barreled rifles.”

SBRs were not added to the NFA by Congress because they “must be subject to heightened requirements”. Rather, the original proposed NFA would have banned handguns and the drafters wanted to make sure that cutting down a rifle didn’t make it into a pistol. When Congress said there was no way in hell that they would ban pistols, the bit about SBRs was forgotten.

ATF Director Steve Dettelbach who knows diddly squat about firearms added:

“This rule enhances public safety and prevents people from circumventing the laws Congress passed almost a century ago. In the days of Al Capone, Congress said back then that short-barreled rifles and sawed-off shotguns should be subjected to greater legal requirements than most other guns. The reason for that is that short-barreled rifles have the greater capability of long guns, yet are easier to conceal, like a pistol,” said ATF Director Steven Dettelbach. “But certain so-called stabilizing braces are designed to just attach to pistols, essentially converting them into short-barreled rifles to be fired from the shoulder. Therefore, they must be treated in the same way under the statute.”

More bullshit. Screw the disabled for whom pistol braces were designed.

The rest of the release includes some gems as “more easily concealable”, “more destructive power”, and “heightened requirements”. In other words, the more they can demonize pistol braces, the better in their minds.

I’m sure this will be a topic of conversation at the SHOT Show. Likewise, I am sure that the lawsuits are already prepared and ready to be filed. It also increases the importance of the 5th Circuit’s ruling in Cargill v. Garland. Under the doctrine of lenity, the ATF cannot just say something is what it isn’t and thus make it a felony to possess one unregistered. That is the job of Congress.

The rule which was released today goes into effect in 120 days.

Here is the full rule and the factoring criteria.

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ATF Request For Comment Closes January 4th

December 22, 2020 by 4 Comments

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives released their official request for comment on “objective factors for classifying weapons with stabilizing braces” on Friday, December 18th. When I last checked, they had received over 4,500 comments on that day alone.

I submitted my own comment on Saturday. Rather than addressing every aspect of their so-called objective factors (which aren’t), I only spoke to weight, caliber, and some accessories as well as to the length of the comment period. It is essential for future litigation that comments address what is specified in the Request for Comment. Moreover, as I understand it, if something is not brought up in the comments, it cannot be brought up later in a suit seeking an injunction.

Please notice that BATFE has signaled their intent to bring most, if not all, brace-equipped pistols under the NFA. In their “generosity”, they will waive the $200 tax. What is not said is that they will have just added upwards of 3 million pistols as to a Federal firearm registry.

Here is the official notice as sent out by BATFE in an email this weekend.

ATF is publishing the objective factors it considers when evaluating firearms with an attached stabilizing brace to determine whether they are considered firearms under the National Firearms Act (NFA) and/or the Gun Control Act. 

ATF publishes this notice to inform and invite comment from the industry and public on the proposed guidance prior to issuing a final document.  Upon issuance of final guidance, ATF will provide additional information to aid persons and companies in complying with federal laws and regulations. 

This notice also outlines ATF’s enforcement priorities regarding persons who, prior to publication of this notice, made or acquired, in good faith, firearms equipped with a stabilized brace.

Finally, this notice previews ATF’s and the Department of Justice’s plan to subsequently implement a separate process for current possessors of stabilizer-equipped firearms to choose to register such firearms in compliance with the NFA, including an expedited application process and the retroactive exemption of such firearms from the collection of NFA taxes.

Read the general notice

Submit a Comment by January 4

You may submit comments, identified by docket number ATF 2020R-10, by any of the following methods:

  • Federal eRulemaking Portal: www.regulations.gov. Follow the instructions for submitting comments.
  • Mail: Office of Regulatory Affairs, Enforcement Programs and Services, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, 99 New York Ave. NE, Mail Stop 6N-518, Washington, DC 20226; ATTN: ATF 2020R-10
  • Fax: (202) 648-9741

All comments must reference this document’s docket number (ATF 2020R-10), be legible, and include the commenter’s complete first and last name and full mailing address. ATF will not consider, or respond to, comments that do not meet these requirements or comments containing excessive profanity.

Written comments must be postmarked and electronic comments must be submitted on or before January 4, 2021. All properly completed comments received will be posted without change to the Federal eRulemaking portal, www.regulations.gov, including any personal information provided. 

Submit a formal comment