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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: 2, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 21 2016, @01:50PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 21 2016, @01:50PM (#430502)

    For those "inside" the gun culture, especially those who practice on active multi-user firing ranges, I can see that silencers make sense.

    For those "outside" the gun culture, silencers do just look like an un-necessary convenience for gun owners. Yes, even though "silencers aren't silent," they do reduce the noise footprint of shots being fired, so instead of a home invasion gone wrong waking up an entire neighborhood of 100 houses, maybe it only wakes up the nearest 10 instead? Seems to me that when shots are fired, you want the maximum possible number of people to know about it.

    I lived 2 blocks off of Biscayne Blvd. in Miami during most of the 1990s - from that vantage point, I could hear small arms fire every Friday and Saturday night, at least a dozen, sometimes several dozen shots fired a week. Innocent bystanders were hit by strays a couple of times a year, intended targets died more often than that - no clear statistics were published on how many direct participants of the gun battles were wounded. Sure, if silencers were cheap and readily available, it might have made the neighborhood quieter at night, but it also would have made bad aim even worse, and certainly made shooters less cautious about pulling the trigger (not talking logic here, talking about whether or not the man with the gun will actually fire - give him a silencer and he will gain some degree of confidence that he didn't have before) - the death toll would be higher, how much higher? Hard to say. Do the people advocating for these laws care about the extra people who would be killed? They may think they don't, but here and there, an extra innocent bystander would be hit - and occasionally those bystanders were from the doctors and lawyers' side of the Boulevard.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @02:29PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2016, @02:29PM (#430521)

    I think you have to be realistic that in a military situation on the front lines (admitted or not) given a gun budget of $1000 your average front line grunt is going to buy a higher quality firearm or a medium quality firearm and a backup gun or a medium quality firearm and a boatload of ammo, or a medium-low quality gun and a lot of gunsmith time perfecting it, not a medium quality gun and a silencer. It seems like a very unusual budget allocation.

    Part of front line battle is intimidation and suppression of the enemy. Shoot -n- scoot drills that we did in the Army were not for fun and we didn't say "cover me" for because it sounded cool. The louder more intimidating side keeps the heads down of the other guys and scares them into staying under cover and not shooting back. In battle, intimidating noise is good. Make the opfor think there's a whole squad with you, not just you and your battle buddy.

    Theoretically in a forward edge of battle area scenario like you describe, natural selection would have its way and shooter who carry silencers instead of backup guns would tend to be eliminated over time. "pop pop pop what are those losers shooting at us, pellet guns, everyone return fire" and the attackers get blown away.

    To non gun people, silencers are like black paint; obvious proof of bad intent due to intense media indoctrination, but in reality crooks are better off without the silencer and painting a gun pink instead of black doesn't make bullet wounds hurt any less.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 21 2016, @03:25PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 21 2016, @03:25PM (#430559)

      My favorite "Saturday night story" happened once around midnight: pop pop pop pop pop BOOM. Sounded like someone with a .22 handgun taking shots at a guy who finally (10 seconds later) got his .45 aimed and shut them down with a single round. Unclear if anyone was actually hit, but neither gun fired again after that.

      For all the shots fired, there was also a lot of pistol waving that went on - the big chromed handguns would come out to settle arguments without actually pulling the trigger. The Boulevard was not my favorite place to go walking in the evenings.

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