Suppressors terrify a lot of people. Often called "silencers," suppressors reduce the noise level of a gunshot. They don't silence it – hence why I tend not to call them silencers – but they suppress it.
And they're NFA items that you have to jump through additional hoops to get, but now a lot more people have them and some are freaking out.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation pushed to make the process easier, which the ATF did with an electronic application process, and it turns out a lot of people are taking advantage of it. The NSSF is celebrating it, which is just irking the anti-gunners at the Everytown-run Smoking Gun:
This past April, the NSSF “praised new data” revealing that NFA processing wait times had “significantly dropped following direct NSSF advocacy efforts among lawmakers in Washington, D.C.” The NSSF also stated that it began pushing for the ATF to process NFA applications electronically as far back as 2013. In that April blog post, the NSSF’s senior vice president and general counsel, Larry Keane, said, “We’re pleased to see industry efforts to reduce these wait times have been successful for our association members and for lawful firearm owners.”
More recently, when the NSSF’s research director, Salom Fatohi, announced that Americans owned nearly 5 million silencers, he claimed that silencers are now “as normalized among the shooting and hunting community as TikTok is with Gen Z. What was a rarity as recently as a decade ago, it is now a normal occurrence to find a suppressor-equipped firearm at a local range or hunting camp.”
According to Fatohi, shooters and hunters who “previously dreaded [the] long wait time to purchase” a silencer are now being drawn to buying them. “As a result, silencer registration metrics are off the chart.”
Fatohi noted that the NSSF is continuing to push for bills like the Hearing Protection Act, which would remove silencers from the NFA and allow them to be sold like any other firearm, and the Tax Stamp Revenue Transfer for Wildlife and Recreation Act, which would “reallocate the funding generated from suppressor tax stamps” so that 15 percent of the revenue “would go to the ATF’s NFA division to fund and further improve the processing” of silencer applications.
Why is this a bad thing?
Well, it's not.
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Suppressors aren't like in the movies. They don't make it whisper-quiet. They just reduce the noise to a level where you're less likely to incur hearing damage, especially if you're not the one shooting it. In fact, it reduces it to a point where gun ranges would have less issue with the neighbors getting bent out of shape because people are shooting.
But that's not good enough for the anti-gunners. Neither are a lot of other things:
Attempts at silencer deregulation are often pitched as helping protect the hearing of gun owners, but shooting a silencer-equipped firearm without hearing protection can still cause permanent hearing damage.
In an infographic, the NSSF claimed that silencers “make shooting and hunting safer and more enjoyable,” and that there were “only 15 federal cases involving the use of a suppressor in the commission of a crime from 1995 to 2005.” But the source the NSSF cited actually states that there were significantly more cases — 153 — during that decade in which “evidence suggests a silencer was used for a criminal purpose.”
Yep. You got them. They should have said 15 per year during that span, which is exactly what the source says. They goofed, but anyone remotely honest intellectually would have been able to see that. Call them on it? Sure, that's fine, but don't pretend there was dishonesty at work.
Then we have this:
Additionally, that small window of time does not include the use of silencers in recent mass shootings — like those that occurred in Virginia Beach in 2019 and Monterey Park in 2023 — or cases involving armed robbers, drug traffickers, terrorists, anti-government extremists, and people who have attacked police, as cataloged in this Violence Policy Center report. The ATF states that it recovered and traced nearly 300 silencers from crime scenes in 2022 alone.
OK, so first of all, the Monterey Park killer used a homemade suppressor, which means it was illegal. Illegal suppressors have absolutely nothing to do with the NSSF's take on the increase in suppressors being purchased lawfully.
Second, 300 suppressors being "recovered and traced" doesn't mean much.
First, that's 0.006 percent of the 5 million suppressors the NSSF says are in private hands. That's not statistically significant.
Second, those numbers don't differentiate between lawfully purchased suppressors and those stolen or obtained illegally through some other manner.
Finally, we must remember that "recovered and traced" at a crime scene doesn't necessarily mean they were used in a crime. They could have been found at the home of someone who lawfully purchased them but was accused of a completely different crime. It also doesn't mean the owner was the one accused of a crime, necessarily. For example, if my guns are taken and traced by police because my wife is accused of something – purely hypothetical here because my wife is a saint. She puts up with me, after all – then that would show up in those numbers, too.
So all in all, we have an anti-gun outlet losing their minds over suppressors while simultaneously showing just how little cause for concern suppressors actually are.
