Gun Rights Groups Celebrate Suppressor Victory

There are a lot of people who support gun rights who aren’t thrilled with President Donald Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill. They feel it adds too much debt, gives massive tax breaks to people in high-tax states while screwing over the rest of the country, or a host of other reasons.

But there’s one thing in there that has we gun rights advocates–there is a difference between supporters and advocates, for the record–are singing and dancing over, and that’s the Hearing Protection Act.

On that, at least, it seems everyone is pretty happy.

Second Amendment advocacy groups on Thursday cheered their win on deregulating gun suppressors, calling it a first step in a broader campaign to dismantle archaic firearm laws.

The House-passed budget bill included provisions to eliminate the registration and $200 tax on suppressors. If the provision survives in the Senate version of the “big, beautiful bill” and is signed by President Donald Trump, buyers will only have to pass an FBI background check to purchase one.

The accessory has been tangled in the Al Capone-era National Firearms Act, which requires buyers to get a $200 stamp of approval from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Initially seen as a sinister gun add-on by crime bosses, advocates have long said “silencers” are key to lessening hearing damage at ranges.

Of course, anti-gun voices are claiming this is a massive issue and now we’re all gonna die, there will be blood in the streets, or whatever hysterical ramblings they want to use.

However, should this survive the Senate and be signed into law, what we’re going to see is that absolutely nothing will happen that wouldn’t happen without suppressors. There’s so much misinformation out there about what suppressors do that the hysteria is bordering on hysteria as medically defined back in the day.

One thing not mentioned in the above-linked article is that many of us are less than thrilled that the SHORT Act wasn’t included as well.

However, this is a massive step forward as it is, and the SHORT Act isn’t actually dead. It might not have been in the House version, but there’s still some hope that the Senate might include it. If that happens, the two acts could be signed into law following reconciliation in Congress, but just so long as both measures survive there.

The fight on that isn’t over.

Yet I’ll go on record saying that even if we don’t get everything we want, we’re still notching a major win. We need to celebrate that. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep fighting, but it’s also important to remember that we’re never getting our rights back overnight. There’s too much money wrapped up in opposing that.

But we can keep notching wins and being aggressive in going after the restoration of our rights. We can take them back with every opportunity using measures like this, where they can sort of sneak under the anti-gun left’s radar because they’re too focused on the other things. We do that and step by step, we’ll get back to the world we deserve.

The one where I can order an M2 Browning off of Amazon and have it delivered right to my door without special licenses.

Ah, what a glorious world that will be.