re: #108 Wendell Zurkowitz (slave to the waffle light)

Only in America can you make these kind of arguments and not get laughed out of town…

Gun Groups Push to Make Silencers Easier to Purchase

“It could be a really big deal for the gun industry,” said Waldron. “They make hunting and shooting safer.

There’s sort of semi legit argument buried under all that gun industry bullshit. Silencers are totally legal in several countries that have much stricter gun control laws than the US. New Zealand, France, and I believe Norway don’t regulate them at all, they’re considered just another accessory like a scope. In those countries it’s actually considered courteous to use a silencer while out target shooting or hunting, to reduce the amount of noise experienced by other people.

The obvious difference is that in those countries getting any gun requires much more in the way of thorough background checks, police interviews, personal recommendations and safe storage requirements & inspections. Also there are often restrictions on caliber, and some demonstration that one has a legit need for a firearm. But mostly it’s different because getting semi automatic pistols (or any handgun for that matter) in such countries is even more difficult still.

That’s because silencers only really quiet a few calibers, the ones with standard loads where the bullet always remains at a subsonic velocity, and most of those (like the .45 acp) are pistol cartridges. Any bullet going faster than the speed of sound will leave a sonic boom in its wake, and silencers do little to nothing to make those rounds appreciably stealthy. They do reduce the muzzle report on a hunting rifle but anyone within a mile or more will still absolutely recognize the sound as a gunshot.

Anyway, again the answer that seemingly nobody wants to hear is that handguns are the problem. Handguns are involved in the vast majority of every type of firearms related offense, and handguns are the weapons that silencers truly tend to make even more abusable and conducive to murder. If the US did all it could to focus on, regulate and reduce the number of handguns in private possession we would realize the most significant improvement in our rate of death by firearms.