In 1934, the National Firearms Act (NFA) was passed by Congress. The bill which became law was a consolation prize for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) administration. The primary purpose of licensing and registration of all handguns had been stripped from the bill because of lobbying by the NRA and Second Amendment supporters. One of the items left in the bill was an absurdly high tax on silencers/suppressors. The $200 tax was the equivalent of five months wages for a person earning minimum wage.
Silencers had never been involved much in crime. No serious reason is included in legislative history for the inclusion of silencers in the NFA. Their ban was part of the hysteria of the time. The new Attorney General, Homer Cummings, conflated guns and crime. The NFA was his grab for power within the FDR administration.
In 1934, when what was left of the National Firearms Act made silencers unaffordable except for the very rich, the law was relatively limited. It only applied to silencers which had crossed state lines. If you made your own silencer, it was not involved in interstate commerce, so the federal law did not apply. It was the middle of the depression, and people were too concerned with having enough to eat and a roof over their heads to be worried about a silly new federal law.
All of that changed over the next 50 years. The Interstate Commerce clause and the National Firearms Act of 1934 were expanded far, far beyond what had been the original boundaries. Short barreled rifles came to include pistols with shoulder stocks. Short barreled shotguns came to include revolvers with shot cartridges and a smooth bore. The Interstate commerce clause came to include almost everything. Bureaucracies came to be the dominant ruling force in most people's lives.
Many states came to mirror federal law about silencers and other items regulated by the National Firearms Act. This served two purposes. It tied state and federal law together so that court challenges had to overcome both state and federal defenses. It provided a way for state and local law officials to prosecute people for what had been made a crime by the National Firearms Act.
By 2000, inflation had eroded the insanely high $200 tax on silencer ownership to the merely extreme one week's minimum wage. The truth about silencers and their many beneficial uses was being exposed.
By 2020, the fight to restore Second Amendment rights was in full swing in the courts. In 2025, the $200 tax on silencers was eliminated by statute. In 2026 there are several lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the inclusion of silencers, short barreled rifles and short barreled shotguns in the NFA.
If the federal law is removed, state laws which reinforced the NFA create a trap. If a law requires compliance with an NFA rule which no longer exists, hundreds of thousands could become felons overnight, without any action on their part. Fortunately, several states are taking action to prevent this legal disaster.
Texas eliminated their requirement to comply with the federal law on silencers in 2021. Mississippi passed a similar bill in 2023, which is contingent on the state of federal silencer law. Montana passed a bill eliminating the federal requirement in 2025. Here is the Montana provision:
45-8-336. Possession of silencer. (1) A person commits the offense of possession of a silencer if the person possesses, manufactures, transports, buys, or sells a silencer and has the purpose to use it to commit an offense or knows that another person has such a purpose.
South Dakota eliminated the requirement for federal compliance in 2026. Other states have bills in progress. They are:
Arizona, SB1069 in process.
Missouri, a bill is in progress, SB273.
Ohio, Senate Bill 214 in process.
Analysis:
The trend is in favor of removing silencers from the NFA and of eliminating unnecessary state regulation as well. It is plausible the Supreme Court will eventually issue an opinion to the effect silencers/suppressors are arms protected by the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court moves slowly. The court has a hundred times more demand on its time than it has time. Restoration of rights protected by the Second Amendment is happening, but it all takes time. The information above is not comprehensive. State laws are changing rapidly. Use the comments to add information about bills and statutes not mentioned in the article.
©2026 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
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