DOJ Opposes Statewide NFA Relief in the Missouri Case

Last updated October 2026 · By Nick Hall, NFA owner who has sat through the Form 4 wait four times since 2019

Quick take: The Justice Department has told a federal judge in Missouri that the 11 states suing over NFA registration can’t have a statewide or nationwide injunction. It wants five of them dismissed and says Missouri alone has tried to back up a valid theory of standing. This is a brief and not a ruling, so the Form 4 still applies to everyone the Texas injunction doesn’t cover.

• What happened: On October 7, 2026 the Justice Department filed a seven-page brief in Brown v. ATF, case 4:25-cv-01162 in the Eastern District of Missouri, opposing an injunction “throughout Plaintiff States and the United States.”
• Why it matters: DOJ says Missouri is the only state that has tried to prove standing, and only for NFA firearms the state itself acquires and possesses.
• What’s next: The plaintiffs may respond within seven days of the brief, and Chief Judge Stephen R. Clark has set a status conference for October 22, 2026, at 10 a.m. CDT via Zoom.
• Who to watch: Judge Clark, who has had the summary judgment motions under submission since an August 10 hearing and has not ruled on them.

Most of the NFA news this fall has been a ruling or a deadline. This is neither one. It’s seven pages of the government telling a judge how small it thinks the Missouri case should be. I read all seven, plus the two court orders on either side of them, and here is what they say.

Table of Contents

What DOJ’s Third Supplemental Brief Asks For

The filing is Defendants’ Third Supplemental Brief, document 114 on the docket, dated October 7, 2026. It is signed by Jody D. Lowenstein, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch.

It exists because the judge asked for it. On September 30, he ordered the government to address two questions: the standing of Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Utah, and whether Missouri’s amended complaint was valid.

Some background. Missouri sued ATF on September 8 alongside gun owner Dave Marshak, and on September 16 the court consolidated that suit into the older Brown case. Eight days later Missouri amended its complaint to add ten more states: Kansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Utah.

The states joined the Brown plaintiffs’ summary judgment motion the same day. In their filing they ask the court to bar enforcement of the challenged NFA provisions against the plaintiffs, against five states’ agencies and employees, “and throughout Plaintiff States and the United States.”

DOJ’s answer fits in one sentence of the brief: “a routine application of claim preclusion bars several states from joining this lawsuit, and all the states lack standing to seek relief for their residents.”

Why DOJ Says Five States Already Had Their Day in Texas

Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Utah were also plaintiffs in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, the Northern District of Texas case where Judge James Wesley Hendrix issued a permanent injunction on August 5, 2026.

DOJ says that ends it for them. The five “seek to join this lawsuit after having just obtained a final judgment based on the same claims” against the same defendants, the brief says. “This is a textbook case of claim preclusion.”

Claim preclusion is the rule that you get one lawsuit per claim. The brief quotes the Supreme Court’s wording: “a final judgment forecloses successive litigation of the very same claim.” DOJ asks Judge Clark to dismiss all five.

The states saw this coming. A footnote in their own filing concedes that the five “obtained injunctive relief as to their state agencies and political subdivisions” in Texas, and says they “do not seek injunctive relief as to those entities” in Missouri. What they want here is the wider order.

DOJ doesn’t buy the distinction. Its footnote says “there’s no daylight between the remedies requested here and in Silencer Shop.”

And here’s the kicker. DOJ points out that the same states are asking the Texas court to clarify that its injunction “specifically enjoins enforcement of the challenged NFA regulations within their borders.”

That is the clarification fight we covered when DOJ decided not to appeal the Texas ruling. The brief describes the request as still pending.

The Parens Patriae Problem With a Statewide NFA Injunction

The nationwide request gets the shortest treatment. DOJ says an injunction throughout the United States “is foreclosed by Trump v. CASA,” the 2025 decision in which, the brief says, “the Supreme Court held that federal courts lack authority to issue such relief.”

Then comes a jab: “Presumably aware that their request for a universal injunction is unjustifiable, the states don’t try to justify it.”

Statewide relief is the real fight. The states say NFA registration harms their residents, and DOJ calls that a “thinly veiled attempt” at parens patriae standing, the doctrine under which a state sues as guardian of its own citizens.

Citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Murthy v. Missouri, the brief says the states “cannot proceed as parens patriae against the federal government to protect their residents from the operation of a federal statute.”

The states offered other theories, and DOJ takes them in turn. On the claim that the NFA interferes with pro-gun state policy, “they don’t point to a single state law that the NFA preempts.” On lost sales tax revenue, the brief says Eighth Circuit precedent “squarely forecloses this theory of harm.”

That leaves direct regulation, since states own NFA firearms too. DOJ says the ten states other than Missouri “submitted no evidence in support of their standing.”

So by the government’s count, “Missouri is the only state that has attempted to substantiate a valid theory of standing,” through a declaration from Captain Scott B. White, and even that theory supports relief only for the NFA’s “direct regulation of the state in its sovereign capacity as an acquirer and possessor of NFA firearms,” which is a long way from an order covering every gun counter in Missouri.

DOJ did give Missouri one thing. The amended complaint “appears to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” Rule 15 allows one amendment as a matter of course within 21 days of service, and Missouri amended on September 24, “fourteen days after serving its original complaint on defendants.”

What Judge Clark Put on the October 22 Agenda

The day before the brief landed, Judge Clark issued a two-page order of his own. It opens with Texas. ATF, he wrote, “had until October 5 to appeal the injunction to the Fifth Circuit.”

The next sentence: “That date has come and gone without an appeal.”

He then ordered the parties to a status conference “on October 22, 2026, at 10 a.m. CDT via Zoom.” The order adds that “Lead trial counsel for each party must appear for the conference.”

Three topics are listed. The first is “the effect of the final judgment in Silencer Shop on this case.” The second is the standing of the five overlapping states. The third is whether the amendment that added the new states “was valid.”

The public can listen by phone, and the order gives the dial-in number.

Before the conference, the plaintiffs get to answer. The September 30 order says: “Within seven days after Defendants file their supplemental brief, Plaintiffs may file a response.” DOJ filed on October 7, so that window runs through October 14.

The main event is still pending too. The docket shows the cross-motions for summary judgment were argued on August 10, 2026 and “taken under submission,” with no ruling entered through October 7.

What the Brief Doesn’t Change for Suppressor Buyers

But this is one side’s argument. Not a ruling. Judge Clark has not decided whether any state has standing, how wide any relief could be, or the summary judgment motions themselves.

The brief is also narrow. It answers the two questions the court asked about the states. Dave Marshak’s name does not appear in it, and it makes no new argument about the Brown plaintiffs who started this case in August 2025.

For buyers, nothing moved. No injunction has issued in the Missouri case, so nobody is excused from NFA registration because of it. If you are outside the Texas injunction, the Form 4 or Form 1 is still the law for your suppressor or short-barreled rifle.

Living in Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Dakota or Utah doesn’t settle it either. Whether the Texas order reaches transfers “within their borders” is the very thing those states have asked the Texas court to clarify.

If Judge Clark accepts DOJ’s view, the states’ part of the case shrinks to Missouri’s own state-owned NFA firearms. If he rejects it, a statewide order is at least possible, and the nationwide request still has to get past Trump v. CASA.

Eleven states asked for the whole country. DOJ says one of them has a case, and only for its own guns. The judge hasn’t ruled on any of it.

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