The Hearing Protection Fearmongering Continues

The Hearing Protection Act should survive the Byrd Rule challenge it’s currently dealing with, in part because, as Cam noted on Wednesday, it deals with the tax portion specifically. Remove the tax, and there’s no reason to have a registry, which was just about knowing who paid the tax.

The National Firearms Act really revolves around taxes, not availability. The way those who passed the law saw it, it didn’t violate the Second Amendment because it didn’t tell anyone what they could and couldn’t have.

Yet now that suppressors are potentially being removed from the NFA, the usual suspects are losing their minds.

And they’re fearmongering like crazy about it, such as in this op-ed.

The budget bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate has rightly drawn a lot of criticism for its sharp cuts to Medicaid. But what has largely escaped the public’s attention is the part of the bill that would aid mass shooters, terrorists, and assassins by deregulating gun silencers. 

Silencers on guns make it harder for ordinary civilians and police to hear the sound, see the flash, and quickly detect the location of the shooter. Thus they can serve to facilitate mass shootings. 

In Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 2019, a gunman who shot and killed twelve people used a silencer. At first, those present didn’t even know that a shooting was underway. Some of them began running but didn’t know which way to go because they hadn’t heard the gunfire. 

I find it amusing that the author had to go back to 2019 to find a high-profile case involving a legally purchased suppressor.

First, Virginia Beach kind of proves that their inclusion on the NFA doesn’t stop bad actors from doing bad things with legally purchased suppressors if they decide to do so.

Second, this whole thing was written by someone who learned everything they know about suppressors from television or movies. A number of suppressors don’t even lower the sound of a shot enough to justify shooting without hearing protection in some cases, and none make those shots whisper quiet. Sure, people didn’t recognize the sounds at first in Virginia Beach, but part of that was simply because they didn’t realize what they were hearing in the first place.

I also notice that the author didn’t mention the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. His alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, allegedly used a 3D-printed suppressor that he didn’t purchase legally.

Unfortunately, legalizing silencers fits the pattern of Trump’s second term gun policy. He weakened the Brady background check system by revoking President Joe Biden’s Zero Tolerance Policy. Under it, the licenses of gun dealers could be cancelled if they failed to run background checks as required or sold guns to prohibited people. And Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would even allow “irresponsible and dangerous gun sellers who lost their licenses because of willful violations of the law to get back into business,” as the group Brady United put it. They can simply reapply.

And this is how you know this writer either doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about or is actively lying to his readers.

The policy didn’t somehow make it possible for licenses to be revoked for breaking the law. That’s always been on the table, as well as prosecution, should a licensed dealer fail to conduct a NICS check or knowingly sell a gun to a prohibited person. That’s still something dealers face should they do such a thing.

That wasn’t Biden’s “Zero Tolerance” policy. 

What his policy did was lead to licenses being revoked for things like abbreviating a county instead of spelling it out, or misunderstanding when the 72-hour waiting period for a NICS check properly starts.

So, with either such a poor understanding of what that policy did or a propensity to outright lie to his readers, why should anyone take his expertise on suppressors seriously?

There is no reason.

Suppressors aren’t commonly used in crimes, even with them being available for 3D printing these days. They add bulk to a gun and make it harder to conceal, which most bad guys prize for various reasons. They also have a finite lifespan, which means you can only get the sound suppressed so many times before it stops.

But hey, when you’re focused on fearmongering to delusional nutjobs who are predisposed to being lied to on guns, what else can you expect?