History

In August 2024, at the Texas Trophy Hunters Extravaganza in Fort Worth, federal agents seized 1836 LLC’s display, inventory, firearms, and electronics. Warrants followed at our homes and at the business. What Texas law had told us we could make and keep inside Texas was taken, and then held.

We had read the line the way it is written. The Constitution gives Congress power over commerce among the several states. It does not give Congress a general police power inside one state. In 2021 Texas put that line into statute. A suppressor manufactured in Texas, from raw materials, and sold in Texas was declared not subject to federal law under the interstate-commerce power. We took the State at its word. We stamped the work Made in Texas. We did not ship it out.

What we did not yet see was the second hook.

A suppressor sat under two federal statutes at once. The National Firearms Act of 1934 is a tax statute. Its making tax, its transfer tax, and the registration paperwork built to collect them rest on the taxing power, not on the Gun Control Act. The Gun Control Act of 1968 is the old Federal Firearms Act rewritten. That Act licensed people engaged in the business of firearms, and it was written at interstate commerce. It was never a statute for purely intrastate work. For ninety years the two hooks were crossed, so a fight about one looked like a fight about both.

The tax was the prop. As long as Congress was collecting two hundred dollars to make or transfer a suppressor, courts treated the license, the registry, and the “engaged in the business” rule as machinery in aid of that tax. Commerce Clause challenges to the same machinery had failed for decades on that baseline. We were arguing the commerce line. The government was standing on the tax.

Then the prop was cut. The One Big Beautiful Bill set the making and transfer tax on suppressors to zero, effective January 1, 2026. On August 5, 2026, in Jensen v. ATF, consolidated with Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, Judge James Wesley Hendrix held that Congress had eliminated the constitutional basis for the registration scheme that used to support those taxes. Once that ruling landed, the case against us was dismissed.

Only then did the double hook come apart in plain sight.

The taxing power is real. We are not asking a court to pretend otherwise. The special occupational tax is a tax on the business of dealing in those firearms, and it should stand. If Congress ever puts a transfer tax back into the statute, that tax could stand too but, Silencer shop/Jensen poses a problem for Congress. What should not stand is the licensing scheme the Federal Firearms Act carried into the Gun Control Act, applied to men who never left the state. That rule was never a regulation of intrastate commerce. It was held up by the breadth of the tax. The tax on making and transferring is now zero. Jensen has cut into the old answer that every commerce challenge ran into. The question left is the one we walked in with, and could not yet separate from the tax: whether the Gun Control Act’s engaged-in-the-business license can reach a suppressor made in Texas, sold in Texas, and kept in Texas.

We did not design the sequence. The raid, the warrants, the long hold, the tax going to zero, Jensen, the dismissal. Read backward, it is a straight line to a narrower and truer complaint. We are filing that complaint. The commerce power has a border. On suppressors made and kept in Texas, the government crossed it.