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Everyone should have a gun silencer, right? [1]

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Date: 2025-05-15

I didn't even know it was legal to have gun silencers. A suppressor is choice to criminals to kill silently. It does mean you could do target shooting without earmuffs.

Stuck in the middle of the "big, beautiful bill" in front of Congress is the removal of the $200 tax on silencers. It will be $0.

The NRA is absolutely ecstatic. It was an excise tax put in place in the National Firearms Act of 1934. Why does it need to be removed? There should be a cost of entry to have one. There is still a $5 ATF fee, submit fingerprints. Online with passport photos. You still have to go through the ATF filing even though the excise tax is $0.

Suppressors are damned expensive. One costs around $830 retail. Rep. Eric Burlison from Missouri, who got the 12 line repeal in the bill said, "This is about making sure that people keep their hearing at the end of the day." He skipped over a similar repeal for short barreled rifles. Damn. I didn't know it was ever legal to have a sawed off shotgun.

Rep. Mike Thomas of California had a much more logical take on why there shouldn't be suppressors at all. They "make it harder for victims of mass shootings to know where the shots are coming from as they're trying to run for cover." It also makes it harder for police to locate a shooter.

The silencer was invented in 1908 (PDF). It's first use in a murder-suicide was in New York's Central Park in 1915. There have been mass shootings using one over the years. A homemade one was used in 2023 in Monterey Park, killing 11 people and injuring 9 others. A month later a former policeman, Charles Dorner, murdered 4 people and wounded several others using a firearm with a silencer. So don't tell me the only way to get a bad guy with a silencer is for a good guy to have a silencer.

Initiating this tax repeal was never about saving people's hearing. Everybody who can afford a gun can afford a set of earmuffs. It's all about getting rid of every last vestige of sense in controlling guns.

They tackle every state that has banned assault weapons. They want to keep the ATF on a paper only record system. You do know that they are legally blocked from creating a computerized database, right? That was passed long ago so gun owners wouldn't be hassled or if there was a law passed that outlawed guns, they knew who to come after. The 2nd Amendment blocks the latter action, so it's just ornery stupidity that has us in this wild, wild west, where there are more guns than people in the US. The rest of the world looks at us as stupid for our gun violence.

The violence never stops because guns make the weak, powerful. That's why there are so many murders every year, and why children die from guns more than anything else, every year.

Just recently, the UnitedHealthCare CEO was murdered by the killer using a gun with a silencer.

Even with the licensing required, there are 5 million of them in the U.S., up from 285,000 in 2011. The mass shooter at the Buffalo supermarket, in his manifesto, bemoaned the fact that he couldn't get one in New York, and he didn't have the machining equipment to make one. Lucky for those he didn't get a chance to kill.

Every year we see more gun laws struck down, and we don't ever see ones that even gun owners are for, like universal background checks and closing the gun show loophole.

It would be nice if we could reduce gun violence, but making suppressors cheaper isn't the way to go.

The budget bill might not pass at all with this provision in it. But it also could be left in every version that would get passed.

If the NRA is for it, I'm against it. As Professor Wagstaff (Groucho) would have sung in "Horse Feathers."

Silence may be golden, but I'd rather know where that gunshot is coming from. I don't think it should be legal to have one at all. That's my opinion. I don't see why anyone should have an assault rifle. I don't see why anyone needs a handgun with a 50 count magazine. There's no reason for one except to kill people. I feel the same way about suppressors.

End of rant.

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