The United Kingdom isn’t friendly to guns, as I’ve pointed out something like a thousand times by now. I touched on it earlier today, as a matter of fact.
On the whole, we here in the United States have a much greater degree of freedom, and not just on guns. No one is knocking on our door in order to arrest us because of a mean tweet that we’d already deleted.
But, in fairness, there’s one area where they might be getting more freedom than us, and we were so close to getting it, too.
That’s right, I’m talking about suppressors.
Gun control groups like Everytown and Giffords, however, maintain that the “NFA has kept silencers out of criminal hands for over eighty years,” and that suppressors “are inherently dangerous devices” that “present a serious public safety concern” and “should not be widely available to civilians.” Suppressors, they allege, do not protect a shooter’s hearing, and the “real reason the gun lobby wants to deregulate silencers is so that the industry can profit off their sale.”
Such claims would lead one to expect that the United Kingdom, as rabidly weapon-adverse and anti-gun as Giffords and Everytown and their supporters could ever wish, would likewise maintain draconian legislative controls on these “inherently dangerous devices that criminals may use to suppress the sound of gunfire and mask muzzle flash.”
Yet, in fact, the opposite appears to be happening.
In 2024, the U.K. government published a public consultation paper seeking input regarding its proposal to remove “sound moderators” from firearm licensing laws. Sound moderators, a.k.a. suppressors or silencers, are controlled under section 57(1)(d) of the Firearms Act 1968, which (much like the U.S. Gun Control Act and NFA) defines “firearm” to include “an accessory to a lethal barrelled weapon or a prohibited weapon where the accessory is designed or adapted to diminish the noise or flash caused by firing the weapon.”
…
Taking all of these viewpoints into account, the conclusion reached by the government was that there “are strong arguments in favour of removing sound moderators from firearms licensing controls. As set out in the consultation paper, these items are a firearms accessory that present no danger in themselves to the public.” Despite this finding and the overwhelming public consensus, the government still opted to couple deregulation with a recommendation that possession of sound moderators be limited to those in possession of a valid firearms certificate. The next step would be to make the necessary changes through legislation to remove “sound moderator” from the Firearms Act 1968, and “we will seek to make this change when Parliamentary time allows.”
Of course, these mirror many arguments made by our side of the debate on the Hearing Protection Act. Suppressors are safety devices. On their own, they can do nothing. They could be sold in every convenience store in the country–Buc-ee’s could have its own brand, even–and it wouldn’t do anything to raise the violent crime rate. Not even the “gun crime” rate.
Why? Because suppressors don’t do anything on their own. They’re just tubes with baffles in them to reduce the noise of a gunshot to a degree where hearing damage is less likely to occur.
That’s it.
Of course, those who claim they want “commonsense gun control” similar to what they have in the UK will ignore this entirely, even should Parliament passes it.
For them, a nation’s gun laws are only useful as a basis for restriction, not something akin to the restoration of rights.
While anti-gunners kept pretending the gun industry just wanted profits–something they don’t seem to worry about when their preferred industries back legislation that might benefit them–we didn’t quite get as much of our rights restored as we should have.
Hopefully, that will change in the near future. For now, though, it looks like there’s a strong possibility that the UK will get deregulated suppressors before we do, though, and that’s a very weird thing to consider.
What’s next? France being militarily competent? China embracing freedom? Hollywood making good movies again?
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