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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: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Monday November 21 2016, @02:56PM

    by RedBear (1734) on Monday November 21 2016, @02:56PM (#430536)

    I didn't vote for Adol--AHEM, I mean Trump, and haven't voted Republican in a long time, but this story reminds me of something my parents said. They were certified Firearms Safety and Hunter Safety instructors. They said that small-caliber firearms like .22 rifles were actually far more dangerous to your hearing than bigger "loud" guns for two reasons. One, the "report" or sound of the shot is much "sharper". As in, it's a very sudden, sharp noise at a higher frequency, that impacts the eardrum more harshly than a large-caliber report does. I don't know exactly how true this is. But the second reason is that people assume that the sound of a .22 won't harm your hearing, so they frequently don't bother to use hearing protection while shooting a small-caliber firearm.

    Being that something like a .22 is the easiest to design an effective noise suppressor for, and being that anyone who intends to commit crimes with suppressed firearms can easily obtain or manufacture their own, and being that noise suppressors don't actually suppress noise nearly as effectively as those in movies, and being that I am generally against pointless prohibition of most things, I can't find myself being in staunch opposition to lifting the ban on noise suppressors (or if you prefer the older misnomer, "silencers", which is really not what they are). If .22 pistols and rifles alone where to be given some moderate noise suppression, it could maybe save a lot of people's hearing. Any firearm, including a .22 but certainly any larger caliber will still be plenty loud. If what you're worried about ,with regard to noise suppressors is people committing homicide in silence you should worry more about things like crossbows and knives.

    --
    ¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
    ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
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