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Yelling About Silencers

Peggy Tartaro by Peggy Tartaro
January 8, 2019
in News, Op-Ed
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And now for a little peace and quiet!

It’s been a very loud last few months and I am sure many readers have found themselves in a similar position as I did recently, when a decades-long friendship devolved into a shouting match.

The subject? So-called silencers and, by extension, the inherent evilness of Donald Trump and his family.

Sometime in January a story appeared that had Donald Trump Jr. advocating for better laws governing suppressors, popularly, if erroneously, known is silencers.

My friend, already on edge about all things political, began to rail against the kind of over-privileged person who could take up the cause of such a bad, bad thing.

We have been friends a long time–since grammar school– and so over the many years we have made peace with the fact that we disagree on a lot of things, and we always will.

But, I may have rolled my eyes.  And there may have been a com­ment about how I was rolling my eyes.  And there was, in fact a little yelling before I mentioned (per­haps in a loudish voice) that she didn’t know what she was talking about. One of the reasons we are still friends, despite many differences, is that she is almost always will­ing to learn new things, even if it might be accompanied by a certain amount of “show me” truculence.

And, so I proceed to explain that while I was not an expert on them, and had never had the opportu­nity to use one, “silencers” were in fact, not silent and were more properly called “suppressors,” in that, unlike in the movies, they don’t silence the report of a gun, but rather suppress it.

I mentioned that they had been in use for at least a 100 years in modern form; that they were in fairly wide use for hunting, es­pecially in Europe, and that they were heavily taxed under provi­sions of the National Firearms Act (NF.A) of 1934 (which most people associate with the regula­tion and taxation of true machine guns). I also said they were legal, under the NFA provisions, in most states, but not ours.

While I likely did not change her views on any of the other top­ics under “discussion” that day, I did succeed in educating her on suppressors, perhaps even interest­ing her in trying one out some day.

A few days later, The Washington Post carried an op-ed by Rob­ert Spitzer, author of Guns Across America and a political science professor at SUNY Cortland.

“Gunfire-loud, sharp, rude, abrupt-is an important safety feature of any firearm. From po­tential victims who seek to escape a mass shooting to a hiker being alerted to the presence of a hunter in the woods, the sound warns by­standers of potentially lethal dan­ger. Yet gun advocates insist there is a greater danger: hearing loss by gun owners,” Spitzer wrote

“The NRA is renewing with gusto its misbegotten push, be­gun in the last Congress, to make gun silencers easier to acquire by swiping a page from the public health community’s long-standing efforts to warn of the dangers of firearms. The Hearing Protection Act, which would remove federal registration and identification re­quirements for those seeking gun silencers, has received the blessing of President Trump’s son, Donald Jr., and the welcome of the gun-friendly 115th Congress. Even though silencer purchase are legal in all but eight states, advocates want to sweep aside background check and record-keeping requirements, such as photos and fingerprinting, first enacted as part of the National Firearms Act of 1934, a law passed to curb gangster weapons such as submachine guns and sawed-off shotguns” he continued.

­Spitzer further argued, “Beyond the familiar political imperative to eviscerate any_ and all gun laws – so why not this one? – the goal is clearly to boost silencer (advocates prefer the term ‘suppressor’) sales, which have already become a gun industry boomlet. Further proliferation of silencers would also have the commercial benefit of boosting gun sales, because most existing guns do not have the threaded barrels necessary to attach them.”

It is interesting to note that Spitzer could have (and maybe did) write almost the same thing, substituting “assault weapons” for “silencers” 20 years ago.

The willful misunderstanding of how things work and the use of slangy, yet inaccurate terms, is pretty common in the anti-gun playbo0k. It has been successful in demonizing classes of firearms in the past. Gun owners, not immune to the charms of slang, have been complicit in some of this.

But it is incumbent on us to be­gin using proper terminology and to explain-even at top volume­–how things really work.

Peggy Tartaro

Peggy Tartaro

Peggy Tartaro was the executive editor of Women & Guns magazine, while it was a publication of the Second Amendment Foundation. She serves as the managing editor of The Gun Mag.com. In addition to her duties as editor of the magazine, she has become a well-known spokesperson for the gun rights cause, appearing on numerous international, national and local television and radio programs to discuss the firearms civil rights issue. She has also dealt extensively with the print medium, through interviews with such titles as Glamour and the New York Times Magazine. She has consulted with authors of both fiction and non-fiction whose work is focused on women’s personal protection issues. An NRA Life Member, she served for several years as a member of the National Rifle Association’s Women’s Policies Committee. In 2007 she was the NRA’s Sybil Luddington Women’s Freedom Award winner. In 1997, she became a trustee of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), and serves as that national gun rights group’s treasurer.

Women & Guns

Women & Guns is the World's First Firearms Publication dedicated to women. Providing the latest news, reviews, legal perspectives, and training information for shooting enthusiasts since 1989.

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