Gun organizations and advocates hope to make silencers easier to buy and own, said a report in
the Washington Free Beacon.
The Hearing Protection Act would ease federal rules on silencers by exempting them from a 1934 law that regulates fully automatic weapons.
The NRA, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and silencer maker SilencerCo are part of a group that have made the act a priority. As the law stands, buying a silencer requires a $200 tax and a wait of months for the ATF to process the paperwork.
"The difficulty to get a silencer doesn't make any logical sense," SilencerCo CEO Joshua Waldron said.
"It could be a really big deal for the gun industry," said Waldron. "They make hunting and shooting safer.
"That's an issue that everybody on both sides of the table can get behind."
According to Waldron, car mufflers and gun silencers were both invented by the same man, Hiram Percy Maxim, an
American inventor who turned his work on the silencer into the exhaust muffler.
Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon told the Free Beacon silencers are "a great training tool" and should not have been regulated by the 1934 law. He added that the act has support from both Democrats and Republicans and "we already have 55 co-sponsors."
A report in 2008 by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said, "A silencer is useful to assassins but clearly has no purpose for sportsmen."
Minnesota state legislator Joe Mullery asked, “What legitimate reason does a person have to be wandering around the streets of a big city with a silencer?”
reported Reuters.
However, Waldron stated that "there have been zero legally-owned suppressors used in crimes since the '30s."
A 2007 study in the Western Criminology Review estimated that silencers were used in 30 to 40 out of 75,000 federal criminal cases each year. The study found two federal murder cases in which a silencer was used,
reported the Guardian.
Salmon said silencers help prevent hearing loss among hunters, some of whom don't use hearing protection because it prevents them from hearing the animals they hunt. Salmon himself has experienced loss of hearing due to gun use.
Those who oppose silencers, Salmon said, "get all of their knowledge from watching 'The Bourne Identity.'"
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.