In the wake of the Hearing Protection Act's inclusion in the controversial budget bill, gun owners are feeling pretty good, all things considered. We didn't get the short-barreled rifles via the SHORT Act, at least not yet, but getting suppressors is big.
And a recent change by the DOJ on suppressors might open the door for more.
See, for a while, the DOJ argued that suppressors weren't arms under the Second Amendment, so their inclusion on the NFA was perfectly constitutional. This was, of course, nonsense, but that was the position.]
Yet the DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi took a look at its position on a number of gun cases and modified them.
The best case was that they'd just stop fighting them, but that was unlikely to happen. Instead, in that suppressor case, they changed their arguments in a way that's pretty interesting.
FPC LEGAL ALERT: The federal government has changed its position in a criminal case where it previously argued that suppressors aren't protected by the Second Amendment because they're accessories and not arms. The government now argues that:
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) May 23, 2025
1) "[T]he Second Amendment protects… pic.twitter.com/Gc0HX9oW5c
The full post reads:
FPC LEGAL ALERT: The federal government has changed its position in a criminal case where it previously argued that suppressors aren't protected by the Second Amendment because they're accessories and not arms. The government now argues that:
1) "[T]he Second Amendment protects firearm accessories and components such as suppressors"
2) "[R]estrictions on the possession of suppressors burden the right to bear arms, and a ban on the possession of suppressors or other similar accessories would be unconstitutional"
3) The NFA is constitutional because it's "a modest burden" and not a ban
4) The 3-judge panel should rehear the case and correct its analysis, rather than going en banc
You can read the filing here: https://firearmspolicy.org/peterson
Now, acknowledging they're firearms is big, but the truth of the matter is that going forward, this isn't a significant argument should the HPA remain in the budget bill because suppressors will then be legal across the board.
However, the government's argument here is that the current laws on suppressors are constitutional because there's no ban on a category of arms. It's just a mild annoyance, basically.
It's a major annoyance, but I digress.
See, what struck me as interesting here is that machine guns, which are included on the NFA list, are also arms, no matter how you care to cut it. They're literal firearms, after all. They, took, have the same regulatory scheme as suppressors, with one major exception.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a machine gun ban into place. It banned any machine gun made after that date from being transferred between private citizens.
That is a ban, and since it is, by the DOJ's own admission in a similar enough case, that's unconstitutional.
Of course, I'm not an attorney, so I might be completely off-base here, but this still strikes me as a rather stunning admission by the Department of Justice, and I actually can see this being used to open the door for machine gun legalization via the courts. I doubt we could get it through the legislative process, but if the judicial branch were to do it, that would be downright glorious.
