SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.”
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday November 21 2016, @03:10PM
Even subsonic ammunition still makes noise, doesn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressor#Subsonic_ammunition [wikipedia.org]
The mechanism of the gun also makes noise.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Monday November 21 2016, @04:50PM
The mechanism of the gun is nothing compared to the sound of the bullet itself. Guns with suppressors are still LOUD, they're just not as deafeningly loud as guns without them. You still need to wear ear protection with a suppressor. Blame Hollywood for inventing this fairy tale of magically silent guns; they do not exist. The closest you'll get is a pistol that fires tiny little .22LR ammunition and has a really good suppressor; this will still sound like loud hand claps when it's fired. Anything larger (which is anything large enough to actually be useful for purposes other that shooting at paper targets) is going to be very loud even with a suppressor.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Monday November 21 2016, @05:24PM
Thank you; I should have read all the comments before making my own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @06:45PM
The closest you'll get is a pistol that fires tiny little .22LR ammunition and has a really good suppressor; this will still sound like loud hand claps when it's fired. Anything larger (which is anything large enough to actually be useful for purposes other that shooting at paper targets) is going to be very loud even with a suppressor.
You're not wrong in general, but those bits I emphasized are bullshit. First, given the same cartridge, a rifle is no louder than a pistol, and usually quieter due to more expansion in the barrel; thus a rifle with that same ammo and suppressor is at least as quiet, and a lot more practical.
I know different people mean different things by "practical", but I mean: Pistols have one virtue -- ease of carry. To obtain this, they compromise almost every other characteristic vs. a rifle or carbine equivalent, from ballistics to ease of muzzle discipline. That's great if you want to carry a just-in-case gun (in other words, one you probably won't be using) to defend against men, bears, or snakes, or if you're seeking a challenge by using deliberately compromised equipment for hunting or target shooting, but if you're picking up a gun with the intent to go somewhere and use it, a long gun will almost always be the right choice. That's "more practical" in my book.
Second, subsonic .22 ammo, fired from rifle or pistol, is perfectly adequate for shooting cottontails, feral cats, and handles coons and possums with careful shot placement, especially if you modify the 60-grain SSS stuff to hollow-point or flat-point. And if this bill passes, I'm thinking to build my own integrally suppressed carbine shooting .32 ACP (lower pressure, but higher volume, than .22LR) based on a suppressor design intended for a 7.62 rifle -- I think, with care, I should be able to get it in the same "loud hand-clap" range, while making shot placement much less critical on ornery possums.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:33PM
To be honest, the idea of killing small animals didn't even occur to me, nor do I like the idea at all. Can't you just trap them and release them somewhere else? That's what I almost always do with anything I don't want around. For instance, I used to live in Arizona, and frequently found bark scorpions in my house. These are rather dangerous as their poison is very potent. Instead of killing them, I simply trapped them, and since I had a couple of next-door neighbors I didn't like (and who had annoying dogs that barked all the time), I just took the scorpions out at night and threw them over the wall into their yards. I only resorted to killing at that house when it got infested by a bee colony; it was sad, but I can't live in a place where I can't walk in my front yard without getting attacked by a swarm of bees.
Don't you have someone nearby you don't like, perhaps someone who was a jerk in high school or something? Release all the pest animals on his land.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @06:23PM
Don't you have someone nearby you don't like, perhaps someone who was a jerk in high school or something? Release all the pest animals on his land.
It's a nice idea, but alas I was homeschooled. (I think high school is much better than real life for creating such enmity, as I can only think of one example I'd like to do this to; fortunately, we now live in different states.) More to the point, though, I have stupid moral problems with that sort of thing. The guy I've got a beef with, fine, but since critters don't stay in one place, I'm also making life worse for his neighbors. And don't they already have it bad enough just living next door to that jerk?
Anyway, feral cats need to die, it's that simple for me. I can't imagine a place to release them that is not either irresponsibly making my problem someone else's problem, or (for the Arctic, Sahara, etc.) more cruel than shooting them.
Cottontails are hella destructive to an apple orchard -- the population grows ridiculously all summer, then come winter, when there's a hundred starving rabbits and no food above the snow, they'll strip the bark off the trees in a complete girdle at whatever height the snow is, which kills the trees. And because they breed so fast, and the area I live in is so depleted of natural predators, anywhere I could drop them off is most likely already at carrying capacity -- I'm hardly doing them a favor by dropping them into a starvation cycle.
Possums are such ugly sons o' bitches it's hard to feel any sympathy for them, but logically I don't mind them, and I don't mind coons logically or emotionally -- both of these aren't anyone's problems if kept well away from domestic animals and poultry (and for possums, prime coon-hunting woods -- folks who hunt coons for sport hate 'em because they will drive out the coon population), so I'd be theoretically fine with trapping them and releasing them in cropland or forest, away from mine or anyone else's henhouse.
So if all I faced was possums and coons, maybe I would trap them; haven't really thought about it much. But logistically, given I'm already walking the property with a rifle to bag cottontails and cats, I'm not gonna fool around with a live trap as well.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:52PM
Check out this graph [connect.fi]; subsonic bullets do make noise, but there's a huge difference. It also shows that, rather than a sudden change in sound at M=1.0, as too-commonly imagined, there's actually a smoothly increasing sound from about 90dB@M=0.9 to 137dB@M=1.2.
FWIW, I use heavy subsonic .22 LR in a 27"-barreled rifle for coop, garden, and orchard patrol. The pressure as the bullet exits the muzzle, and thus the report, is dramatically lowered from such a long barrel, to the point where people expecting a normal .22 report say it sounds like an air rifle (whatever that's worth), but is still much louder than the bullet.