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posted by martyb on Monday November 21 2016, @06:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the silence-is-golden dept.

A Republican trifecta in Washington next year will likely see action on a bill to remove firearm suppressors from National Firearms Act regulation after 82 years.
The Hearing Protection Act was introduced last October by U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., and currently has 78 bipartisan co-sponsors from 34 states. Since then, the HPA has been among the top 10 most-viewed bills on Congress.gov almost every week since it was introduced.

However, with a slim Republican majority in the Senate unable to override a near-certain veto from President Obama, the bill has been in doldrums.
Now, with the White House under new management next year, advocates for the measure feel signs are looking up and will likely return to the next Congress with a fresh mandate.

Why is this important? Safety has been increasing in nearly every aspect and product since the beginning of time, but allowing people to protect their hearing by adding silencers to their weapons has been a tough road for gun owners for a long while.

“Imagine for a second that we lived in a world where you had to pay a $200 tax to buy a pair of earplugs,” Knox Williams, president of the American Suppressor Association, the industry trade group for the devices, told Guns.com on Wednesday. “Now, imagine that even after paying that tax you still had to wait 8 months before you could bring your earplugs home with you. As silly as that sounds, it’s the world we live in with suppressors in the NFA.”


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:41AM (#430391)

    I actually do put in earplugs when hunting just before shooting. That said, I think the better word is "suppressor" or "moderator" -- the supersonic crack is as loud as the gunpowder exploding. The difference is the position of the noise. Anything straight downrange can hear the crack extremely well because it's so load. The noise directed back at the shooter however, is far less than without a moderator.

    The only way to be as close to silent as possible, is with subsonic ammunition. But that "zoop zoop" you hear in the movies is as much bullshit as rocket engine noise in deep space. The mechanical operation of the firearm, in particular a semi-auto, will generate its own level of clacking. It's weird in the movies - pulling the slide on a gun makes a stereotypical mechanical sound that's super threatening, but when the same gun is fired with a "silencer" the magic kicks in and all you hear is zoop zoop.