This article, authored by Harold Hutchison is republished under the Creative Commons “CC BY-NC-ND” license with permission from The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Several pro-Second Amendment organizations pushed back against the Trump administration for prosecuting alleged violations of the National Firearms Act (NFA) in a brief filed with a federal appeals court Monday.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) joined the American Suppressor Association in submitting the amicus (“friend of the court”) brief to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The brief criticized the administration’s defense of the NFA and that the charges against Christopher Machamer under the law for making short-barreled rifles were unconstitutional.
“Historical tradition recognizes only a narrow class of arms that fall outside the Second Amendment’s protections: weapons that are both dangerous and unusual. Short-barreled rifles are neither,” the brief filed by the gun-rights groups says in its early pages. “Short-barreled rifles are lawful to possess in 45 states, and more than 1.1 million are lawfully possessed nationwide, so they are ‘in common use’ and necessarily not ‘unusual.’”
“Nor are they uniquely ‘dangerous,’” the brief continues. “Short-barreled rifles do not meaningfully differ in function or lethality from other common rifles (long-barreled rifled-firearms) or handguns (short-barreled rifled-firearms). Therefore, short-barreled rifles are protected arms.”
The reconciliation bill signed into law by President Donald Trump in July 2025 contained provisions that reduced the taxes on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and guns described as “any other weapon” to $0 after the Senate parliamentarian struck language that removed those items from NFA’s purview.
Later, the pro-Second Amendment groups targeted the Fifth Circuit’s rationale in the Comeaux ruling, when it said that suppressors were protected by the Second Amendment as “arms,”but that the conviction of Brennan Comeaux for possessing unregistered suppressors was not unconstitutional by describing the NFA as operating like a “shall issue” concealed-carry permit issuing standard.
“The NFA is a registration and taxation regime. ‘Registration requirements … do not meaningfully serve the purpose of ensuring that owners know how to operate guns safely’ and are instead ‘often seen as half-a-loaf measures aimed at deterring gun ownership,’” the brief says, quoting a dissent written in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit‘s ruling in “Heller II.”
“The Supreme Court has indicated that firearm registration is unconstitutional. In Miller, which challenged the NFA’s application to short-barreled shotguns, the Court’s analysis focused on whether short-barreled shotguns were protected arms,” the brief continued. “Yet ‘if registration could be required for all guns, [Miller] could have just said so and ended its analysis; there would have been no need to go to the trouble of considering whether the gun in question was the kind protected under the Second Amendment.’”
While some Second Amendment advocates have expressed frustration over the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) defending gun laws, notably the NFA, from legal challenges, a top administration official told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the criticism was misplaced.
“I understand people have policy differences with DOJ’s enforcement of federal laws, but, in my opinion, and I’ve said this to many gun groups, the appropriate place to launch those policy discussions is in Congress, not with us,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Right Harmeet Dhillon said during a June interview with the DCNF. “We have, I mean, not me, but other people in this building regularly respond to all kinds of litigation on behalf of the United States where I don’t necessarily agree with what we’re defending.”
“[It’s] the other team that picks and chooses which laws they’re gonna enforce, so that’s not what we do,” Dhillon added.
SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Konstadinos Moros told the DCNF that despite the Trump administration defending “unconstitutional laws,” the group did not feel let down.
“We are mostly happy with the Trump Admin, but they are defending some gun laws we think are unconstitutional, like the NFA’s registration requirements,” Moros said. “It’s not surprising they are defending such laws, as the DOJ will generally always defend federal law subject to limited exceptions. But we will do our job and try to defeat them in those instances where federal law violates the Constitution.”
The NRA, DOJ and FPC did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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