United States v. George Peterson

In United States v. Peterson, 127 F.4th 941 (5th Cir. 2025), the Fifth Circuit held that “suppressors do not trigger Second Amendment protection,” and it applied the good-faith exception to deny Peterson’s challenge to the search of his home that led officers to discover his suppressor.

Background: Law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at PDW Solutions, LLC, a firearm business that Peterson ran out of his own home. They had gotten the warrant based on an officer’s affidavit stating that the ATF had been investigating Peterson for months, and it had documented at least two times that Peterson sold firearms and did not report the transactions to the ATF as required by law. Additionally, the affidavit declared that Peterson had violated 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(3) by “representing, in his federal-firearms license application, that he would conduct business only at gun shows and out of a leased storage unit,” when he actually sold the guns from his home.

Holding 1: Suppressors do not constitute “arms,” so their possession is not protected by the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment extends “prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 24 (2022) (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 582)). On the other hand, firearm accessories are not “covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment.”

As the court explained, a suppressor, “by itself, is not a weapon,” and unless attached to a weapon, “it would not be of much use for self-defense.” So suppressors are not “arms” and are not protected by the Second Amendment. For that reason, the law requiring registration of suppressors does not “burden[] a constitutionally protected right.”

Holding 2: The suppressor found during execution of a search warrant would not be suppressed even if the facts in the warrant affidavit were insufficient to show probable cause. The facts alleged in the affidavit “at least present ‘inidicia of probable cause’ sufficient to render belief in its existence reasonable,” which means “the officers who executed the warrant acted reasonably in relying on it.”