Posted: 7/16/2026 4:51:24 AM EDT
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Not seen any discussion on this but if one of the current lawsuits is successful and the NFA is repealed Nevada law states that you cannot as a private citizen have an SBR without it being federally registered do all the owners in NV become criminals overnight? You could argue that existing items were registered as per the law at the time of purchase/manufacture thus satisfying the law. And I guess without a change to the NRS there would be no new SBRs allowed thus a unconstitutional gun ban without any political action, which while it would undoubtedly be challenged certainly would result in a right delayed. Thoughts? |
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Originally Posted By crapshoot: I think and hope our current governor would veto any such changes at the state level that would outlaw them if the nfa is repealed, but who knows. Current law requires SBRs to be registered with the Department of Treasury if I recall correctly. I am not a lawyer, but I think the concern is that the law would need to be updated one way or another or reinterpreted or ruled unconstitutional; I doubt it would be changed favorably with the current legislature, AG, and NV Supreme Court. |
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NRS 202.275 Possession, manufacture or disposition of short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun: Penalty; exceptions. 1. Except as otherwise provided in subsection 3, a person who knowingly or willfully possesses, manufactures or disposes of any short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun is guilty of a category D felony and shall be punished as provided in [NRS 193.130](https://www.leg.state.nv.us/nrs/NRS-193.html#NRS193Sec130). 2. For purposes of this section: (a) “Short-barreled rifle” means: (1) A rifle having one or more barrels less than 16 inches in length; or (2) Any weapon made from a rifle, whether by alteration, modification or other means, with an overall length of less than 26 inches. (b) “Short-barreled shotgun” means: (1) A shotgun having one or more barrels less than 18 inches in length; or (2) Any weapon made from a shotgun, whether by alteration, modification or other means, with an overall length of less than 26 inches. 3. This section does not prohibit: (a) The possession or use of any short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun by any peace officer when authorized to do so in the performance of official duties; (b) The possession of any short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun by a person who is licensed as a firearms importer, manufacturer, collector or dealer by the United States Department of the Treasury, or by a person to whom such a rifle or shotgun is registered with the United States Department of the Treasury; or (c) The possession of any short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun that has been determined to be a collector’s item pursuant to 26 U.S.C. Chapter 53 or a curio or relic pursuant to 18 U.S.C. Chapter 44. Here's how the ruling interacts with NRS 202.275: The base prohibition is untouched by anything happening at the federal level. Subsection 1 defines the crime using Nevada's own barrel-length/overall-length test — it doesn't say "any weapon regulated as an SBR/SBS under the NFA." It's a freestanding state definition. Nothing Congress or a federal court does to the NFA changes what NRS 202.275(1)/(2) criminalize. Only the Nevada Legislature can do that. Where it gets messy is subsection 3 — the exceptions: •3(b), the registration exception ("a person to whom such a rifle or shotgun is registered with the United States Department of the Treasury") was drafted assuming the NFA's registry (NFRTR) as the qualifying mechanism. If SBRs/SBSs come out of NFA purview — whether by the SHORT Act, or by this litigation eliminating the registration requirement — there's no ongoing federal registration process for someone to point to going forward. Existing NFA registrations wouldn't vanish, so people who already registered under the old regime still satisfy "is registered" in a historical sense. But someone who acquires or builds an SBR/SBS after the registration requirement ends has nothing to register — the exception has no federal hook left for them. Read literally, that person would have no state-law defense and would be committing a category D felony in Nevada, even though the same conduct is now unrestricted federally. •3(c), the collector's-item exception ("determined to be a collector's item pursuant to 26 U.S.C. Chapter 53") is the NFA itself. If Chapter 53 no longer covers SBRs/SBSs, that determination mechanism doesn't exist for these items anymore — this specific carve-out goes dormant. The parallel curio/relic exception under 18 U.S.C. Chapter 44 survives on its own, since that's a GCA classification independent of NFA status. •3(a) (peace officers) and the FFL/manufacturer half of 3(b) are unaffected — those don't depend on NFA registration. Net effect: deregulating SBRs/SBSs federally doesn't liberalize Nevada law — it potentially tightens it in practice, because the exceptions Nevada built into 202.275 were parasitic on federal machinery that may no longer exist for new acquisitions. You'd end up with a real gap: legal under federal law, still a felony under Nevada law, with a narrower path to the state-law exception than existed when NFA registration was mandatory. That's not an unusual pattern — a number of states cross-reference federal NFA status in their exceptions, and pulling the federal rug out from under those references tends to orphan the state carve-out rather than repeal the state crime. Fixing this cleanly requires the Nevada Legislature to amend 202.275(3) — either to drop the "registered" language in favor of something not tied to an active federal registry, or to exempt SBR/SBS outright the way many states have handled suppressors. Until that happens, someone in Nevada relying on the current federal changes to justify possessing a newly-acquired SBR/SBS would be taking on real state felony exposure — this is exactly the kind of question worth flagging to a Nevada firearms attorney rather than resolving from the statute alone, given how fast this is moving and that the ruling isn't final. Look at how the two exceptions are structured differently: •3(b) is a status exception — it turns on who the person is: "a person who is licensed as a firearms importer, manufacturer, collector or dealer." Nothing in that clause says the specific weapon has to qualify as anything in particular. It just requires the license. •3(c) is an item exception — it turns on what the weapon is: whether it "has been determined to be a collector's item pursuant to 26 U.S.C. Chapter 53 or a curio or relic pursuant to 18 U.S.C. Chapter 44." Those are drafted as two independent, non-overlapping carve-outs, not one exception with two conditions. If the Legislature had meant to require both — a licensed collector possessing a qualifying collector's item — it would have been natural to write that into a single clause. Instead, it wrote a status-based exception and a separate item-based exception, joined by "or" between (b) and (c) at the top of the subsection. "Licensed as a ... collector ... by the United States Department of the Treasury" is Nevada's (dated) way of referring to what's now a Type 03 FFL — Collector of Curios and Relics — issued by ATF as successor to Treasury. So, on a plain reading, holding a valid C&R license puts a person inside 3(b) regardless of whether the particular SBR or SBS in their possession is itself a C&R-qualifying firearm. That's a real distinction from 3(c), which only protects possession of a firearm that's actually been determined to be a curio, relic, or collector's item. Two things worth flagging: 1.No Nevada case law construes this that I'm aware of. This is my reading of the statutory text, not a settled judicial interpretation. A prosecutor could argue the Legislature obviously intended some nexus between the "collector" license and the weapon's collector status, and that reading 3(b) as a blanket safe harbor for any Type 03 holder produces an absurd result the Legislature didn't intend. Absent a court ruling or AG opinion, anyone relying on this is taking on litigation risk, not a guaranteed defense. 2.Federal law still governs how the item was lawfully acquired, and that's a separate question from the Nevada exception. A C&R license doesn't grant blanket authority to make or acquire SBRs/SBSs — it grants specific interstate-acquisition privileges limited to actual curio/relic firearms under 18 U.S.C. § 923 and the implementing regs. So, the C&R license doesn't retroactively legitimize an unlawfully-made or unlawfully-acquired SBR federally. But if the weapon was otherwise lawfully possessed — built under a valid Form 1, or, post-Jensen, made without any NFA process at all — then yes, simply holding the C&R license would independently satisfy 3(b) in Nevada without needing to show the weapon itself is a collector's item, and without needing to lean on the "registered with Treasury" language we discussed, which is exactly the ambiguous language current NFA developments are undercutting. So, post-Jensen (assuming it survives appeal, or if the SHORT Act gets enacted properly), a $30 mail-in Type 03 license could become the cleanest, most durable path to Nevada state-law compliance for someone possessing a lawfully-made SBR/SBS — cleaner than trying to hang an argument on whether an NFA registration still exists to point to, and without needing the weapon to qualify as an actual antique or C&R item under 3(c). As I read the text: 1.Making the weapon: If Jensen holds up (or the SHORT Act gets enacted with a real repeal, not just the $0 tax fix), there's no more Form 1/Form 4 process for SBRs/SBSs — no registration, no tax, no waiting on ATF approval. Someone could build one the same way they'd build any other firearm under federal law. 2.Nevada's registration-based exception (3(b)'s "registered with the United States Department of the Treasury" prong) goes dead for that person, because there's nothing to register anymore. No NFRTR entry exists to point to. 3.Nevada's collector's-item exception (3(c)) doesn't help either, unless the specific weapon happens to independently qualify as a curio/relic or collector's item — most homemade or newly manufactured SBRs/SBSs won't. 4.That leaves the status prong of 3(b) — being "licensed as a firearms importer, manufacturer, collector or dealer" — as the remaining lever. As I read it, that clause doesn't require the weapon itself to be anything in particular. A Type 03 C&R FFL is cheap, easy to get, requires no NFA nexus, and on the statute's plain text would put the holder inside 3(b) regardless of what the SBR/SBS is or how it was made. So, under that reading, the C&R license becomes the practical Nevada state-law safe harbor for someone who makes or possesses an SBR/SBS with no federal registration to fall back on. That's a genuinely interesting structural result: a licensing regime never designed around SBRs/SBSs at all ends up doing the work that the registration exception used to do. |
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Originally Posted By pedro66: Thanks for taking the time to go through that its a minefield I started to glaze over as I was reading the statute its not my thing Everything I have ATM has a F1 or F4 but going forward until this gets resolved the C&R may be the way There is at least a week to go to see whether or not DOJ fights it or not. Someone told me the dems in our state legislature and senate will try to amend that statute, but I don't see it happening. There's a handful of other states where they copied their statutes from another state (and we probably copied from one of them) so the language is very similar. I know Illinois was one of them because people were getting C&R licenses to get SBRs approved. I stumbled onto this about 10 years ago concerning an NFA item and a photoshoot because I had an FFL. I'm letting my FFL go by the end of the year and plan on getting a C&R for this and other reasons. In a way we lucked out. A lot of other states we think of as RED states do not have a similar provision. This does not cover silencers or AOWs. Currently owned ones should still be good if this ruling holds. If they keep silencers as "firearms" and require a 4473 for transfer we might be ok. If silencers are reclassified as accessories with 0 paperwork; we will need to change the law. |
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But its a law that its impossible to adhere to so surely its not enforceable? "A law that is impossible to follow is known by the legal maxim lex non cogit ad impossibilia, meaning "the law does not compel the impossible". When a requirement is completely unachievable, courts recognize impossibility of performance as a defense so that people are not punished for failing to comply." And surely this applies also "The rule of lenity is a criminal law principle stating that if a criminal statute is unclear or ambiguous, the court must interpret it in the way that is most favorable to the defendant. It acts as a final tiebreaker when standard tools of statutory interpretation fail to resolve a doubt about a crime's meaning or penalty." |
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How is it impossible to adhere to if you could just not own the items? Especially when that is the default for the vast majority of Nevadans? I'm not saying I agree with that, but I'm just making the point. Even if the DOJ doesn't appeal the court ruling striking for the NFA for class members, will it still be possible to register silencers and SBRs using a Form 1 or Form 4 and still comply with state law? That is the question currently on my mind. |
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Because it says in order to own you must register, so offers an impossible pathway to ownership But you make a good point The way I'm reading it is they will have to remove all the records and the mechanism for registration for the zero taxed items |
| Right, I am not a lawyer, but from what I've heard, the default position is banned unless one of the listed exceptions are met as @MikeSearson went into great detail explaining. I would be inclined to think that a possible outcome is that one of those exceptions are removed (eg register with the treasury or authorized by federal law). |
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So are you thinking that they will go for an outright ban by removing the NFA exemption? If they do that do they leave themselves open to a constitutional challenge under unable to ban “firearms in common use” And if they remove the NFA exemption then all current SBR become illegal |
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Originally Posted By DesertRat243: We need to push hard on our representatives and Lombardo to square this away. I don't want them burying this because it might hurt their election. This is an election year. For the State Assembly, House of Representatives and Governor. Our State Assembly and Senate have been fucked because over 150,000 registered republicans simply don't vote. I get it, I hate both parties, too. But we all need to vote harder! |
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Originally Posted By MikeSearson: This is an election year. For the State Assembly, House of Representatives and Governor. Our State Assembly and Senate have been fucked because over 150,000 registered republicans simply don't vote. I get it, I hate both parties, too. But we all need to vote harder! Originally Posted By MikeSearson: Originally Posted By DesertRat243: We need to push hard on our representatives and Lombardo to square this away. I don't want them burying this because it might hurt their election. This is an election year. For the State Assembly, House of Representatives and Governor. Our State Assembly and Senate have been fucked because over 150,000 registered republicans simply don't vote. I get it, I hate both parties, too. But we all need to vote harder! Yeah, I remember a thread on this back when it happened under Sisolak, but basically the state legislature is gerrymandered to the extent that the Democrats are the favorites to keep a majority in both chambers and are within reach of a two thirds supermajority in both chambers. If Lombardo successfully stays in the governor's mansion, Voter ID passes, and the Democrats fail to get a supermajority in at least one chamber of the legislature, we will have had a good election in November. |
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Originally Posted By TheOldRepublic: My face when I found out Nevada has state NFA rules and isn't a free state  https://media3.giphy.com/media/Ow4KRlRhK6ZEc/200.webp?cid=8dc8958cnxbcyccl53u2v21ut5reoeedkgmr7wymhufzwfdh&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=200.webp&ct=g |
I don’t want unity. I want them defeated and subjugated, and I never want them to be a threat to me or my people ever again. - J. Grey