More on Suppressors

This time from The Hill. Note that Shannon Watts just babbles meaninglessly about “semantics” without actually making a point. That’s a good sign they don’t have effective arguments. Everytown makes even less sense:

Gun control groups, in turn, raise concerns about humanizing silencers by comparing them to regular sounds.

“I don’t think it matters, because lawn mowers aren’t responsible for the deaths of about 90 Americans each day,” said Erika Soto Lamb, spokesperson for Everytown for Gun Safety, the group run by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Silencers not only distort the sound of a gun shot, but they also mask the muzzle flash, making it difficult to spot a shooter, said Chipman.

“It could confuse you long enough for a shooter to hit you with a second round of gunfire,” he said.

Seriously? Confuse you? Any suppressed firearm I’ve ever heard other than a low-powered .22 still sounds like a gun when fired. That’s reaching. Erika Soto Lamb also doesn’t seem to realize that lawn mowers do indeed maim and kill a fair number of people each year. Meanwhile, a suppressor is absolutely incapable of killing someone on its own unless you beat them with it.

I think this is going to pass. They’ve rhetorically emptied the gun, and now are throwing it at the monster in an act of desperation.

24 thoughts on “More on Suppressors”

  1. I haven’t followed the issue at all, but, isn’t it true that suppressors are totally legal in France?

    If so, shouldn’t the French experience, whatever it has been, make a good argument?

    I know that’s a naive statement, because state-to-state comparisons (e.g., with Constitutional Carry) here seem to count for nothing, so a foreign nation’s experience will count for less than nothing; yet if we are throwing out arguments, it would seem as useful as any.

    1. In most European countries, they are fairly unregulated. It’s an argument that’s been used, but the hearing protection aspect seems to be more effective.

      1. Approximately nobody cares how someone else does it elsewhere; unless they can use it as a club to beat their political enemies with.

        We have a small advantage in this argument in that everybody understands hearing loss. The problem is they thin that what you hear on TV and in movies is even close to the actual sound level of a firearm. If $ACTION_HERO$ can empty a magazine in a closet and still here $LOVE_INTEREST$ whisper “I love you,” well, silencers aren’t REALLY necessary, are they?

        1. “The problem is they thin that what you hear on TV and in movies is even close to the actual sound level of a firearm.”

          If you think that’s bad, have you ever checked out the actual sound level of hand grenades? ;-)

          1. I have a personal policy against being around hand grenades if I can help it :)

            I did once stand with my ears uncovered at the entrance to the firing line shack of an outdoor firing range when someone touched off something larger than a .22lr; my ears rang for quite some time afterwards, and I won’t do that again.

            1. “I have a personal policy against being around hand grenades if I can help it…”

              In the worst case you aren’t given a choice. :-)

              But I remember a scene in an old TV series, “Combat” I think, where a GI turns over a table, throws a grenade on the other side of the table top, and kills all the Germans in the room while he remains unscathed.

              I remember being instructed in the Army, don’t throw yourself on a grenade to save your buddies, because your body parts will just add to the shrapnel.

  2. The HPA currently has 141 co-sponsors in the House and 16 in the Senate. I suppose when it gets to 218 in the house and 51 in the senate, we might just see some action on it.

    1. “I suppose when it gets to 218 in the house and 51 in the senate, we might just see some action on it.”

      I’ll apologize now for going off on a bit of a tangent, but there is the phenomenon of, close to a majority co-sponsoring a bill, precisely because they all know they will never be called on to vote for it. It will die in committee, or whatever. But if they are confronted with a challenge to their bona fides on the issue later, they will point to their co-sponsorship to demonstrate how sincere they were.

      I think we may be seeing that happen in Pennsylvania on another issue that doesn’t involve guns, right now, but since it’s off-topic, I won’t elaborate.

      On another, “good government” issue, a committee of us once visited a state senator who sponsored legislation to advance the issue in every session, and always had beaucoup cosponsors. He not only didn’t know the content of his own bill, he argued against the major provisions in it.

      So, what do you suppose was going on there?

  3. “reported last August there are [>X] privately-owned silencers in the U.S. More recent reports indicate that number is growing.”

    So between last August and now, eh? Seems like an oddly short time frame.

    I don’t know if it helps or hurts public perception to illuminate the growth in popularity of suppressors – it may play into fear mongering.

    Just seemed like an odd choice

    1. A lot of NFA items submitted for approval last June/July still have not come back (the time to approval is now over 300 days).

      If they count official registrations, the number is going to skyrocket very soon, as all the June/July approvals come back and those will become official

  4. If they pass this, it is only because the squishes in the GOP won’t pass Carry Reciprocity. This is the low-risk pro-2A measure. In the end, every state that wants will probably ban the damn things.

    Maryland has no specific restrictions on suppressors because they have leaned on Fed rules. After the HPA passes, they will. Then I won’t be able to get any suppressors anymore, nor carry in DC.

    They are playing us to avoid passing reciprocity.

    1. If this is the “low-risk” option, then why are there more cosponsors for reciprocity? Cosponsoring that is taking political action to support reciprocity even if there is never a vote. In some ways it’s more definite than an actual yea vote.

      1. Uhh…no. Sorry, but you have that completely backwards.

        Co-sponsoring a bill that never makes its way out of committee is the safe way to “support” something you don’t want to actually happen. It’s an insurance policy against claims you did not support the issue.

        Why anything I say makes sense: I was (for a short time) a registered lobbyist. I had to learn all this stuff and track all the tiny details. I was in the rooms when these kinds of plans were made. I don’t want to oversell my experience, but I am pretty confident in reading this situation right now.

        The caucus decides which bills come out of committee, and those votes are caucus-only, not recorded and held behind closed doors. Leadership has significant sway. Co-sponsoring a bill while quietly supporting moves to “Desk Drawer” a bill in committee is the time-honored way to take political credit for something you have no expectation will pass.

        So Reciprocity will be desk-drawered and HPA will move. Becoming a “co-sponsor” on reciprocity insulates the member against claims they opposed it. All the while, the caucus has already determined reciprocity is going nowhere. Seeing an increase in co-sponsors at this time is generally a sign the bill won’t move.

        Another clue: look at the co-sponsor count and makeup. We’re seeing 193 co-sponsors and some of them are Dems that historically vote with their caucus. That is the prime clue the bill is dead: the Dems would never be allowed by their caucus to vote this into law, but were allowed by their caucus to co-sponsor the bill. Again…this is political noise.

        Another sign the bill is dead: the co-sponsors in the last two months are from “swing” districts. Taking a contentious vote is not good for them, but supporting a measure necessary for their GOP constituents is great news – provided the bill won’t pass. We will be hearing a lot of, “I co-sponsored reciprocity in 2017 but it didn’t make it out of committee. Re-elect me and maybe next time.”

        Also note that between the co-sponsors and the verbal supporters there are enough critters to force a vote via a floor petition (no committee vote required). So technically they have to votes to make it happen. But it won’t. High co-sponsor counts on contentious measures more often than not mean everyone is just lining their re-election credentials using a dead letter.

        Other things to look for include motions on the committee to move the bill. People don’t track arcane parliamentary moves but that is where the real votes occur. If any happen, I’ll be watching.

        There is a chance reciprocity moves, but right now I’m pretty sure its dead and the NRA is right there and knows it. They were almost surely part of the calculus. Congress didn’t want to do anything, but maybe the NRA said “you need to do something”. So they chose the safe HPA bill which will be immediately nullified by blue state legislatures. Everyone gets to make noise and nothing changes but on the margins.

        Sorry to sound like the downer here, but I am sick of our community falling for these games every year. There is no reason for the House to not pass reciprocity other than a desire to not do it.

        1. If you had told me a decade ago when I started blogging the scraps the GOP would be throwing at us would be chipping off a section of the National Firearms Act, I wouldn’t have believed you. But there it is.

          1. I’ll believe it when Trump signs it. I don’t trust the people that run the national Republican Party one bit. I think they hate their voters almost as much as the Democratic party hates us.

            1. Well, he showed us all when he appointed Gorsuch. I can accept the Missouran stance on Trump, but give him a chance to fail to do so before judgement.

        2. “Sorry to sound like the downer here, but I am sick of our community falling for these games every year.”

          You and I may not always agree on what the games are, but that broad concept we can agree on; the gun rights community is gulled by the same people year after year after year, and the more they’re gulled, the deeper in love they fall with those doing the gulling.

  5. “Each year, 800 children are run over by riding mowers or small tractors and more than 600 of those incidents result in amputation; 75 people are killed, and 20,000 injured; one in five deaths involves a child. For children under age 10, major limb loss is most commonly caused by lawn mowers.”

    Damn, I did not know that my daughter is 6x safer shooting the 22 revolver I got her than mowing the lawn.

    Please don’t advertise this, she will use this as an excuse to mow less, shoot more, and the grass will be 6 feet high because I will have lost free labor.

    1. The most dangerous thing that most people do with their kids is put them in a car.

      (Which is more to say that most everything is pretty safe, than that cars are pretty dangerous. Though I consider that guns are deadly, but cars are dangerous.)

  6. I expected this to be about the suppressor issue, but it isn’t.

    “Gun Rights Group Takes a Shot at Elizabeth Warren — Over Effort to Make Hearing Aids Cheaper”

    Hope it’s close enough to being on-topic so as not to offend.

    1. The GOA is a bunch of jackasses. The hearing aid monopoly is a disguising racket. They need to be deregulated badly. There is no excuse for these things costing $3000 a pair.

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