Different Situation

Trump Considers Banning Suppressors

Before we panic and shred our NRA/ILA membership cards (again) and pledge our undying allegiance to the Pratts...

Suppressors aren't occupying a gray area in the NFA.

There are zero products on the market that have or are attempting to circumvent the "arduous" task of filing a Form 1 or Form 4 to possess and own a suppressor.

This is not like bump stocks, which were an attempt to get a machine gun and bypass both the NFA and FOPA.

ATF has ruled, repeatedly, that any device which lowers the sound level of a firearm even so much as one decibel is a suppressor and thus requiring registration.  Just ask the people who'd bought Colt's commercial model of the XM177 series and having to register their moderators.  That was in the early 1970's.

There's nothing here for The President to order the reclassification to that keeps them from being regulated exactly as they presently are.  To get them banned, he's going to need Congress to do it.

Not that it would be difficult to get the present Congress to do so, but...

It wasn't all that long ago that suppressors were nearly made over the counter legal, eliminating the need to register at all.  There's still a lot of voter demand for such deregulation, that's because there's a lot more suppressors out there than bump stocks.

A move to legislate a ban on new suppressors could have repercussions at the ballot box, and I think that Congress knows it.  There's enough legislators who aren't willing to lose their cushy seat for such idealism that I think that it won't pass.

If it does and we get those repercussions, I think the new members of Congress will have a different voice than now and the tone will be set differently than the change in 1994.

ATF= Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives
FOPA = Firearms Owners Protection Act
NFA = National Firearms Act
NRA/ILA = National Rifle Association Institute of Legislative Action