As covered by Guns.com, H.R.1, the so-called "One Big, Beautiful Bill," squeaked through Congress to the Oval Office last week, earning President Trump’s July 4 signature. 

Among its 940 pages is a section that zeroes out some National Firearms Act items, including silencers (suppressors,) short-barreled shotguns (SBSs), short-barreled rifles (SBRs), and Any Other Weapons (AOWs). 

The tax on making (ATF Form 1s) and transferring (Form 4s) those items drops from the traditional $200-- $5 for AOWs-- to $0. 

The $200 tax remains on forms involving machine guns and destructive devices. 

While industry sources tell Guns.com that groups are working on a forbearance agreement with ATF to speed up the implementation of the tax drop, the official word is that the tax won't be dropped until Jan. 1, 2026. 

All other NFA red tape, regulations, and restrictions remain unchanged. Even with the tax on most manufacturing and transfers zeroed out, the items still require the traditional NFA background check process to include fingerprints and a photograph as well as "forever" federal registration of the serialized item in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, or NFRTR. Possession of an unregistered NFA item can still bring up to 10 years in prison, loss of the device, and fines of up to $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for organizations.

A unified group of gun rights member organizations-- the American Suppressor Association, Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, and NRA-- intends to sue the federal government over the NFA's continued inclusion of suppressors and short-barreled firearms on the grounds that the $0 tax doesn't warrant the continued scrutiny.
 

A second coalition, made up of Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation, Palmetto State Armory, the Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition, Silencer Shop, and B & T USA, has promised a similar suit. 

"In the 1930s, the Supreme Court only narrowly upheld the NFA solely as a tax statute, not as a firearms regulatory law," notes GOA in a statement. "In Sonzinsky v. United States (1937), the Court ruled the NFA was permissible under Congress’s taxing power. But once the tax is reduced to $0, the constitutional justification for the law collapses." 

According to the ATF's latest Firearms Commerce report, the agency collected $96 million in NFA making and transfer taxes in 2023, a figure that tripled from 2018, when just $33 million was collected. 

In 2023, the ATF processed 284,533 Form 1s and 471,239 Form 4s. Compare this to just 9,347 Form 1s and 57,294 Form 4s in 2013. 

As of May 2024, the ATF had 8,655,743 items registered on the NFRTR, including 3,536,623 suppressors, 870,286 SBRs, 165,180 SBSs, and 88,149 AOWs.