A federal judge in Texas handed down a ruling this week that is a massive victory for gun owners in Southeast and South Central Missouri. The ruling dealt a major blow to the legal foundation for the tedious, bureaucratic paperwork required for short-barreled guns and suppressors — all because we got rid of the tax used to justify those requirements.

The judge ruled that key parts of the National Firearms Act of 1934 can no longer be enforced against the Americans who brought the case — because the tax that supposedly justified all that registration paperwork, fingerprinting, and federal record-keeping no longer exists. The One, Big, Beautiful Bill, which I authored, got rid of it.

When writing that legislation, I worked with Congressman David Kustoff, whose district borders Missouri’s 8^th Congressional District, to include a provision zeroing out the $200 federal tax the NFA had slapped on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns since 1934. Every House Democrat voted against it, but Republicans still got it across the finish line — because Southeast and South Central Missouri didn’t send me to Washington to protect a Depression-era tax on our firearms.

That provision delivered the largest Second Amendment-related tax cut in American history. The $200 tax hadn’t budged in nearly a century. You have to go all the way back to the Revenue Act of 1928 to find the last time Congress actually cut a federal firearms tax instead of raising one. Every change since then — 1932, 1940, 1941 — was a tax increase. This is the first time in almost a hundred years that Congress moved it the other direction.

Now the courts are catching up to what we got done. This ruling recognizes a simple truth: the government based years of paperwork designed to limit your Second Amendment rights on its taxing power. Take away the tax, and you take away the legal foundation for the paperwork that came with it. The Justice Department has a week to ask a federal appeals court to step in, so this fight isn’t over — but it’s an important step toward ensuring that a law-abiding gun owner in West Plains or Eminence shouldn’t need Washington’s permission slip to buy a suppressor to protect his hearing on the range.

This isn’t complicated for the people I represent. Owning a suppressor or a shorter barrel is nobody’s business but your own, and it shouldn’t come with a federal fee and a stack of paperwork attached. I eliminated the tax, and it’s already paying dividends. I’ll never stop fighting to protect your Second Amendment rights and make sure Washington stays out of your gun cabinet.