A federal appeals court just ruled that the Second Amendment doesn’t cover suppressors at all. The defendant was about the worst test case imaginable, and the ruling will outlive him.
On June 3, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit decided United States v. DeBorba, and buried in it is a line that’s going to get quoted in anti-suppressor briefs for years: suppressors are not “arms” protected by the Second Amendment.
If you own a can, have a stamp pending, or were thinking about one now that the transfer tax is gone, this case is worth ten minutes of your attention.
The defendant nobody would pick
João Ricardo DeBorba is a Brazilian citizen who came to the US in 1999, overstayed his visa the following year, and never fixed his status. He claimed US citizenship on a Washington concealed pistol license application and on ATF purchase forms. He was under multiple domestic violence no-contact orders, including one where a court found he posed a credible threat to his wife’s safety.
When federal agents searched his apartment in 2022, they found five firearms, ammunition, and a box hand-labeled “Tick Suppressor” with an unregistered silencer inside.
Nobody is surprised he lost his appeal. He was going to lose on the facts alone. The problem is how the court chose to get there.
What the court actually said
The panel didn’t stop at “this particular guy had no business with an unregistered can.” It went further and held that suppressors fall outside the plain text of the Second Amendment entirely.
Leaning on its 2025 en banc decision in Duncan v. Bonta (the California magazine ban case), the court called suppressors “optional accessories” — in the same bucket as slings and scopes. The logic: a gun fires fine without one, so a suppressor isn’t an “arm” and gets no constitutional protection.
The panel also held that the National Firearms Act’s registration scheme is a “shall-issue” licensing system that’s presumptively constitutional under Bruen. DeBorba argued the old $200 transfer tax was an excessive burden, but that argument died on its own: the tax dropped to $0 on January 1, 2026, and the court said the point was moot. The Fourth and Fifth Circuits have landed in roughly the same place on the NFA’s process.
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The contradiction at the center of it
Here’s the part that doesn’t sit right. Federal law regulates a silencer as a “firearm” under the NFA. To legally own one you submit fingerprints, a photograph, and a registration, and you wait on the ATF. The government treats the item as a firearm when it wants to regulate you.
But when a citizen claims constitutional protection for the same item, suddenly it’s not an “arm” at all. It’s an accessory, like a sling.
You can think suppressors should be regulated and still see the problem with that. The government is arguing both sides of the same definition, depending on which side helps it that day.
Why the timing makes it worse
Second Amendment lawyers have been watching Sanchez v. Bonta, the direct challenge to California’s outright suppressor ban. That case was already argued before the Ninth Circuit, and it presented the clean version of the question: are suppressors protected arms? Good facts, sympathetic plaintiffs, a square legal issue.
Instead, a criminal appeal with terrible facts got there first. Now there’s published Ninth Circuit language saying suppressors aren’t arms, and the judges deciding Sanchez can simply cite it. As USA Carry’s writeup put it, a bad-facts case beat the good vehicle to the punch.
This is an old pattern in gun litigation. Prosecutors don’t pick defendants like DeBorba by accident; cases like his produce rulings that then apply to everyone, including the guy who did everything by the book.
What this means for you, practically
Nothing about this ruling changes the process of buying a suppressor. The NFA path still works, the tax is still $0, and millions of registered cans are still legal in the states that allow them.
What changed is the legal ground underneath. Within the Ninth Circuit (that’s California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, and more), state-level suppressor bans now have a much easier defense in court. If you live in a ban state and were hoping Sanchez would open things up, this ruling cut the odds.
And if you’ve been on the fence in a state where cans are legal: the process exists today and the tax is gone. Court trends this direction are not a reason to wait.
Bottom line
A panel of the Ninth Circuit used a sympathetic-to-nobody criminal case to declare suppressors unprotected by the Second Amendment, and that language will now show up in every suppressor-ban defense in the circuit. The ruling that matters next is Sanchez v. Bonta. We’ll cover it when it lands.
Skip this: don’t waste energy on the “suppressors are already legal, who cares” take you’ll see in comment sections. Constitutional protection is what stands between “legal today” and “banned by the next legislature.” That’s the whole fight.
