The Justice Department declined to appeal a court ruling that effectively dismantled longstanding restrictions on owning short-barreled guns and suppressors, bowing to pressure from Republicans and gun advocates.
Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas had said that his order striking down the mandated permitting process under the National Firearms Act as unconstitutional would go into effect Thursday unless the Justice Department appealed it. Trump administration officials didn’t file an appeal to the court before 12:01 a.m. Thursday, according to publicly available court records.
In effect, the Trump administration stepped aside, for now, and allowed the Prohibition-era gun control measure to lapse under judicial scrutiny after President Trump signed a law last year that weakened the restrictions by removing a $200 tax for the permit. The administration has another 52 days to file an appeal in the case.
Gun rights groups and gun businesses, many of which had filed and supported the lawsuit, celebrated the overturning of the law. Groups supporting gun restrictions criticized the government’s inaction, arguing that the ruling had deregulated dangerous, easily concealable firearms and accessories that had been restricted since 1934.
The Justice Department did not explain why it did not immediately appeal the ruling. In an unsigned statement to The New York Times hours before the midnight deadline, the Justice Department said that it “respects Americans’ Second Amendment rights and is currently assessing the impact of the court’s ruling.”
It was a retreat by the Trump administration, which had argued after Mr. Trump’s law was passed last year that Congress still had the authority to restrict particularly dangerous and easily concealable weapons. The government’s move to forgo a stay of the ruling — or issue any public statement on the issue — came after gun rights groups and dozens of Republican lawmakers publicly pressured Todd Blanche, the attorney general, to allow the ruling to stand.
“The Department of Justice had the opportunity to act to protect our safety, but it failed to do so,” Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement, noting the campaign from Republican lawmakers. “Our elected officials are supposed to serve the American people, not the gun industry’s bottom line. Today, the gun industry and silencer dealers are celebrating, while Americans are left less safe.”
Seeking clarification from the government on where it stood on the ruling, the lobbying group Gun Owners of America issued a public letter Wednesday to Trump administration officials. It said that gun stores planned to start selling suppressors, which are devices fitted onto the barrel of a gun to reduce the deafening sound of gunfire, without following the permitting process after midnight Thursday.
Gun buyers will still need to complete a standard background check to purchase the weapons, and restrictions under state laws will still apply. California, New York and Washington, D.C., for example, have banned the sale and ownership of short-barreled rifles and suppressors.
The National Firearms Act was the primary law that regulated and restricted the sale and possession of suppressors. Once a niche accessory for civilian gun owners, the popularity of suppressors has skyrocketed in recent years, as more gun owners use them to prevent hearing damage and brain injuries.
The effect of Judge Hendrix’s ruling is wide, but not universal. The Supreme Court limited the ability of lower-court judges to completely block executive branch policies nationwide, but the ruling still applies to a wide class of millions of gun owners, as well as retailers and manufacturers. Many states also joined the lawsuit. Crucially, the ruling also applies to customers of the businesses who were part of the case. One of the retailers, Palmetto State Armory, is one of the largest online gun stores in the country.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 had instituted a tax-and-registration requirement for rifles and shotguns with short barrels, as well as for suppressors — weapons that Congress sought to curb because they were deemed particularly suited for violent crime. The law was written as lawmakers warned of a “serious national emergency” driven by gun crime as the country reeled from Prohibition-era gang shootings and an attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The law also regulated the sale and ownership of machine guns through the permitting process, but that part of the law remains intact.
Millions of N.F.A. restricted guns and suppressors were sold every year under the registration process, which is managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The $200 tax was designed to be prohibitively expensive in 1934 dollars, but by 2026 amounted to a fraction of the cost of a modern firearm or suppressor.
House Republicans added a provision eliminating the $200 tax on suppressors and short-barreled rifles when they passed Mr. Trump’s major spending bill last year.
That change triggered the downfall of the law, which had for 92 years required buyers of restricted arms to submit their fingerprints and seek A.T.F. approval. Gun advocacy groups quickly filed several lawsuits seeking to further weaken the law, arguing that the registration process was unconstitutional without the tax component.
Judge Hendrix agreed with that argument, ruling in a 66-page order that because the law no longer generated revenue, “its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power” given to Congress in Article 1 of the Constitution.
