I was in a gun shop earlier today while waiting for my pizza to be made at the restaurant next door when the "sales"...
I was in a gun shop earlier today while waiting for my pizza to be made at the restaurant next door when the "sales" associate began telling me about silencers and why I needed one. [protip: I don't need one. No one really needs one, as they're a want more than a need] He complained that, if you wanted one, you had to jump through legal hurdles at roughly $1300 in fees and taxes. After he said "taxes" he pointed at a poster on the wall: Without Representation, a call-back to the fundamental reason the USA exists today: no taxation without representation. He was being nice to me so I didn't bring up the store's logical fallacy of not being represented in government. In fact, it's a very red area and they're very represented in state and federal government.
Comments
They're not nearly as quiet as they show in the movies unless you're shooting a small caliber subsonic round. Frankly the argument that they make the sport safer is a strong one. An AR-15 with a suppressor is still very loud, it's just not dangerously loud.
I'm not sure I understand why folks have been fixating on them recently. They don't seem to factor into the real dangers of firearms in our society (suicide and domestic assault being big issues we tend to ignore while talking about whether or not a gun can "look military" or not).
Things like bump-stocks seem designed to skirt the law and I'm not a fan. Want to shoot full auto? Get the proper license or go to a gun range and rent time from someone who does.
And if you're hunting, you're really only shooting one or two shots a day. Your ears can survive that. What they can't survive is hours on the range or the battlefield where the repeated gunfire can damage the ear's internal mechanics.
If there's a weakness in the argument I'd love to hear it; it seems reasonable to me.
I'm fully aware we have serious problems in the US with guns/gun culture/white male terrorists/etc. I agree that we need to make changes and I support the notion that we could use gun control regulations to further protect people. I'm just not sure what suppressors have to do with that.
Then again I didn't understand what the big deal with the artificial "assault weapon" rules were meant to do either; they attacked how a gun could be accessorized rather than anything useful.
I'm a big fan of firearms. I don't really hunt; I prefer shooting sports (target shooting specifically; I'm only dangerous to paper bullseyes and bottles of water. I don't pretend to be Rambo or anything like that). I'd love to be able to spend an afternoon plinking rounds at targets and not annoy the neighbors so much.
All that said I recognize that there are definitely problems in our society that are leading to more deaths and injuries than we should be tolerating. We definitely need to make some changes. I would love to see stronger educational requirements for weapon ownership. I'd love to see better protections for domestic abuse situations. I know we can and should make real changes to address these issues and I'm not trying to push an unlimited interpretation of the second amendment or anything...
So why are suppressors bad? I'm genuinely interested; I've not yet found a counter argument that is compelling. Instead I've heard nonsense like they'd amke it harder to find out where someone is shooting from, to which I replied: that's not a thing in two ways -- People are bad at figuring out where gunfire is coming from already, especially at range such as in the recent white male terrorist attack in Vegas, and this hasn't factored into the major issues (e.g. domestic abuse and suicide, which are much larger problems than our more televised mass shootings -- which also haven't involved suppressors as a key ingredient as far as I have heard). In short it's solving a problem we don't have rather than the ones we know we do have.
But maybe I'm missing something. It's happened before. :-)
.223 with a can makes the noise of a .22. To make it fully silenced it's just a case of downloading your ammo to below 1080fps, but that in itself isn't that simple.
Uh, the ATF transfer tax is only $200. Sounds like this guy isn't just a nutter, but a thief as well.