Excellent news for gun owners came last week when the U.S. House of Representatives passed President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, which includes the complete removal of suppressors from the National Firearms Act (NFA). This measure would eliminate the $200 NFA tax and the NFA’s application and registry requirements (the sole statutory purpose of which is to administer the tax) with respect to suppressors. If enacted into law in its current form, the bill would effectively leave suppressors to be regulated as ordinary “firearms” under the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Unsurprisingly, U.S. representatives bent on curbing Americans’ ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights weren’t pleased with this development.
On May 22, during an early morning floor debate over the legislation, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) registered her opposition to the bill. In reference to the suppressor tax reduction, she stated, “then, of course, as we mentioned about the silencers, it’s just beyond comprehension.”
According to the former speaker of the House, it is incomprehensible that lawmakers want to eliminate a prohibitory tax scheme on harmless devices that help their constituents lawfully exercise their Second Amendment rights with reduced risk of hearing damage.
Yet the longtime representative from San Francisco still didn’t manage to provide the worst take of the week. That dubious distinction belongs to Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) who argued the current tax on suppressors doesn’t go far enough, and law-abiding Americans already enjoy too much freedom.
In a meeting of the House Rules Committee, Dean claimed to be shocked by the level to which Americans are already exercising their right to keep and bear arms. The congresswoman stated,
You know what the dollars are? It’s $1.4 billion over 10 years. I did the math. That means something like 700,000 silencers are sold in this country a year. That baffles me. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but by the numbers and by the math, that’s what we’re talking about.
Dean took issue with the fact that the suppressor tax has not kept up with inflation and acknowledged its infringing nature: “the tax was used to try to discourage the purchasing of silencers.”
The congresswoman went on to elaborate her preferred scenarios. She said,
If we doubled it, if we just went to $400, you could sell only half as many and not lose a penny in revenue. If we tripled it, you might actually discourage some sales of silencers. Wouldn’t that be a good thing for us to be doing in this committee?
Gun owners should let Dean’s comments serve as a lesson that anti-gun lawmakers aren’t above using any means at their disposal, including perverting the U.S. tax code, to wage their war on gun owners and Second Amendment rights.
Whatever means or rationalizations they use to get there, prohibition is always the end game.
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