The race to roll back the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) took a leap forward this week, but the push isn’t without potential drawbacks for its supporters.

On Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released the text of its section of the budget bill. In it, Republicans granted the wishes of gun-rights activists and expanded on the House text. It incorporated short-barrel shotguns and rifles as well as “any other weapons” (think umbrella or cane guns) into the NFA delisting attempt.

We’ve covered why going after the NFA through budget reconciliation is likely the best shot advocates have at success anytime soon, but it’s important to understand the risks in the strategy, too. Both the short-term dangers of the language that made it into the Senate text and the long-term risks of the overall strategy.

While the Senate language is much closer to what the coalition of gun-rights groups ultimately wants in terms of how many categories of arms it delists from the NFA, it is also more vulnerable to an adverse ruling from the parliamentarian. Unlike the House language, which separates the tax elimination from the delisting provisions, the Senate language simplifies things by just delisting everything. The effect would be the same if they both made it into law, but the Senate’s approach raises the risk gun-rights advocates end up with nothing.

That’s because sources involved in drafting the bill widely believe delisting is the higher hurdle to clear during the Byrd Bath, where Democrats will challenge a number of provisions against the Byrd Rule. If the parliamentarian finds delisting doesn’t have a primarily budgetary impact, the tax elimination won’t be kept in. It all goes.

The American Suppressor Association’s (ASA) Knox Williams said there is a plan for that eventuality. If they lose on delisting, advocates are looking to get a Senator to offer up an amendment that just eliminates the taxes. That could certainly work, but there is some risk in trying to get a provision the parliamentarian stripped out added back in after the fact–especially with the breakneck pace Republicans are trying to achieve on this bill.

The same problem applies to the section of the text that attempts to address state-level NFA mirror laws. Some states require that anyone who wants to legally possess NFA items obtain federal permission first. If you cut some items from the NFA, it becomes impossible to get that permission and could therefore make it illegal for people in those states to own the delisted devices.

The Senate text tries to address this problem by basically declaring those state requirements moot. It’s unclear how states with mirror laws, like Colorado, or the courts would react to that language. But, also, more pressingly, the Senate left silencers out of that language. It only applies to short-barrel firearms and “any other weapons.”

That will need a fix before the bill gets to a final vote, which Williams said is also in the works.

ASA, Gun Owners of America, the National Rifle Association, and numerous other groups have been in lockstep during this push, though. And they’ve been successful in getting Republicans to do what they want. It’s a risk that doesn’t last, or that Republicans were only willing to put the full-fat delisting effort in the bill because they were confident it would get stripped out, but that’s a slimmer risk at this point.

The bigger risks come if the bill gets through in any form.

Primarily, the problem comes from precedent-setting. If Republicans can eliminate the NFA’s $200 tax on various items through reconciliation, Democrats can likely reinstate it and even raise it. In fact, that idea has already been suggested.

Pennsylvania Congresswoman Madeleine Dean (D.) said as much during markup of the House version.

“If we doubled it, if we just went to $400, you could sell only half as many and not lose a penny in revenue,” she said back in May. “If we tripled it, you might actually discourage some sales of silencers. Wouldn’t that be a good thing for us to be doing in this committee?”

Similarly, if Republicans can remove certain firearms and accessories from the NFA through reconciliation, Democrats can add them back later on. Perhaps they can even expand the reach of the NFA under the budget process’s 50-vote Senate threshold, too. Expanding the NFA to cover AR-15s and other firearms Democrats commonly call “assault weapons” has also been suggested before.

In fact, it was a prominent part of Joe Biden’s platform during his successful 2020 presidential campaign. He proposed a buyback of “assault weapons,” including the AR-15, that would “give individuals who now possess assault weapons or high-capacity magazines two options: sell the weapons to the government, or register them under the National Firearms Act.”

Biden didn’t get anywhere with that idea during his presidency, but it’s entirely possible the next Democrat or gun-control advocate to win the position when his party controls Congress could reanimate it. That possibility becomes much more likely if Republicans and gun-rights activists succeed in partially repealing the NFA through reconciliation. After all, gun-control activists have called on Democrats to outright nuke the filibuster to get to the same 50-vote threshold they could more easily reach through budget reconciliation instead.

So, those are the major risks for gun-rights activists in this effort.

Of course, many of the people leading this fight have already baked at least some of these risks into their calculus. It’s not hard to see why they’re almost certainly going to push forward anyway. Repealing parts of the NFA is nearly impossible any other way at this point. There aren’t 60 votes for this in the Senate. There may not even be majority support for this in the House as a standalone effort–if you could even get the floor time to get it to a vote.

Reconciliation in 2025 is the best chance for silencer and short-barrel shotgun delisting that activists are likely to see for at least another two years. Probably significantly longer than that if the current decline in the president’s polling numbers holds through the midterms. It’s now or never, and gun-rights activists will probably hold their concerns about how gun-control activists could use the same tactics to achieve the opposite results for after they see if they can actually get the most significant federal pro-gun reform across the finish line.

But they’re still real, and everyone should have their eyes wide open going into this.