Hearing Protection Act feedback

[bikemutt]

I wrote all my congress persons asking them to support the Hearing Protection Act. They all got back to me, this one stood out.

Thank you for contacting me regarding the Hearing Protection Act, H.R. 367. I appreciate you taking the time to share your concerns with me.

The Hearing Protection Act, H.R. 367, was recently reintroduced by Representative Jeff Duncan. The bill would remove suppressors from the list of items regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Current regulations, mandated by the National Firearms Act of 1934, require buyers of suppressors to apply for a permit from the ATF, pay a $200 tax, and pass a separate ATF background check. This legislation was also introduced in the previous 114th Congress as H.R. 3799, sponsored by former Representative Salmon.

While I respect and acknowledge that there exists a legitimate use of suppressors for hearing protection in recreational shooting, and the use of them for some legitimate sporting purposes, I would not cosponsor legislation such as H.R. 367. Suppressors, by their very nature, can be used by criminals with devastating effect. H.R. 367 would increase the availability of suppressors, as well as the potential for their misuse. I believe that enforcement of existing laws works to prevent gun violence while ensuring law-abiding Americans enjoy their Second Amendment rights.

I'm just wondering what to think about his response.

What is the nature of suppressors that would allow criminals to use them with devastating effect?

The Act, as far as I know, would still require a background check to buy a suppressor. Then, you have to have a suppressor host, a gun, another item requiring a background check. I always thought background checks prevented criminals from acquiring guns (and suppressors). So now we're down to removing a $200 barrier to entry, and an 8 month wait, for someone who can't pass a background check.

I'm exasperated.

 

[barnbwt]

I'd respond he is being a dishonest liar, and dare him to cite a single example of a silencer used in violent crime today as opposed to Hollywood. That the real, tangible benefits he himself acknowledges obviously outweigh his cowardly, ignorant, imagined fears. And I would tell him I will be sending his response to this followup on to the NRA and other local RKBA orgs & media for dissimination in the coming election.

Tell him silencers are the one thing gun owners are asking for from a Republican congress they steadfastly support and brought to victory last November, and that cowards like him have failed them going on thirty years with their reluctance to pass any legitimate improvements in gun policy. Not a single one.

Thank him & his staffers for actually bothering to articulate a real response unlike so many of his colleagues.

TCB

 

[pintler]

If suppressors become more common in legal hands, they will also become more common in criminal hands, because of burglaries and so on.

I don't think that current suppressor designs will be commonly used by crooks for a couple of reasons:
-the majority of crime with guns is crime with handguns, and I don't see your average mugger
wanting to screw a suppressor on the end of his pistol before a mugging. It makes it too hard to conceal.
This might change with integrally suppressed pistols if they can get them small enough.
-for most crimes, noise isn't an issue
-for a mugging, they are using the gun to intimidate, they hope not to fire it at all
-for a drive by, say, even a suppressed weapon will make enough noise that in urban areas
it will be noticed and people will call 911. I used to live in an urban area where hearing gunfire was
common. After the first few calls to 911 to say ' I just heard 9 gunshots somewhere
south of us' we learned that wasn't useful. If we thought we had a good direction and it was within
100 yards, we called; otherwise only people who were closer could localize it enough to be useful.

There are some criminal contexts where they would be useful, I'd think - the perfect-for-TX-hog rifle
with night vision and a can is also pretty good for deer poaching, I'd think. Just not very many.

So there are tradeoffs. This is hardly new - drug dealers make good (well, actually bad) use of cell phones, forgers love photoshop and high quality printers, kiddie pornographers need cameras, and so on. In the context of sound, crooks probably like car mufflers as much as the rest of us (the poacher out spotlighting, for example, wants their truck to be as quiet as possible, I'd think).

Another reason I don't suspect they will be hugely attractive to crooks is that they aren't hard to make. Sure, your high end inconel and titanium can is pretty high tech, but that's because we don't want them to be disposable. Making one that works reasonably well and lasts for a few hundred rounds is easier, say, than cooking meth. If crooks really wanted them, they'd already have them. In this sense they are sort of like lockpicks. Those are generally legal (unless you get caught with a set in a context that suggests you're up to no good). There isn't much sense in a total ban because crooks can make their own, so why not let the locking picking hobbyists (I know several) have their fun? The rare crook who is dedicated enough to learn lockpicking can always make his own set. And while the hobbyists seem to have fun with them, you don't get tinnitus from a lack of lockpicks.

In short, balancing the good and bad of suppressors, they ought to be available with no more hassle than the gun they attach to.

(as an aside - if someone really thinks the current suppressor background checks add value, why not lower the tax to $5 and the approval delay to 1 week. That would largely pull the wind out of the HPA's sails; we'd get our cans, they'd get the background checks they think are important)

 

[wally]

if someone really thinks the current suppressor background checks add value, why not lower the tax to $5 and the approval delay to 1 week.

Also apply it to form 1 "making" and re-open the registry, and you've a compromise worthy of Salomon

 

[Swing]

I'm just wondering what to think about his response.

At best, he sounds intellectually dishonest.

 

[barnbwt]

What's funny, is we have pellet rifles (and I think even some pellet pistols) that rival small rimfire weapons as far as danger, and which are pretty much all available with silencers to drop sound levels even further...and yet criminals aren't wrecking silent havoc with them. Strange. Especially considering how easy silencers are to improvise, even for true firearms.

The dirty secret is violent criminals are lazy, and generally not all that imaginative on the individual level, which is why they chose guns in the first place, and why they don't bother with silencers for the most part. Poachers, which the law was designed to target during the widespread starvation & migration of the Depression, are another matter. But they used, use, and will use silencers and rimfire cartridges for reduced auditory signature regardless, the NFA being merely another charge on top of all the poaching statutes being violated.

TCB

 

[barnbwt]

At best, he sounds intellectually dishonest.

I actually think he sounds conflicted, and/or compromised. He basically acknowledges OP's arguments as sound, then says he's going another direction anyway; this suggests something besides his personal logic & feelings is making the decision. Namely, special interest lobbying groups, or very realistically the typical (ignorant) view of his constituents. In that case, he's being a useless empty suit or worse yet, sock puppet for some anti-gun org.

TCB

 

[RPRNY]

Sounds like a Democrat in a district that is not rock solid blue.

 

[bikemutt]

Maybe the congressman believes making it less onerous to own a suppressor is akin to handing out the master key to all residential burglars.

 

[Schwing]

I would go so far as to say that he needs a T-Shirt with the caption:

"EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT GUN VIOLENCE I LEARNED WATCHING MOVIES."

 

[jdc1244]

I'm exasperated.

Or just naïve to have believed the proposed measure had a chance to become law.

 

[bikemutt]

Or just naïve to have believed the proposed measure had a chance to become law.

I'll respectfully disagree concerning my naivete. I'm not a gambler so I don't care much about the chance of things happening or not. Had the congressman's response included more reasoned arguments, perhaps I wouldn't have been exasperated.

 

[GEM]

There are no reasoned arguments anymore in the gun rights debate. The parties have dichotomized the issue to make it totemic for their parties. Any progun law will not be considered by the vast majority of the Democrats. There may be a few in mixed districts that might support a mild progun bill but that number is dropping.

On the Republican Federal side - they are supposedly the progun party but really lack the will or motivation to go all out for the issue. They will propose legislation and then let it languish while they play with their current pet agendas (Obama vs. Trump Care; Tax cuts, The Bathroom, etc.) In a way, they are more dishonest than the Democrats - they out and out oppose you. The GOP just blathers and does nothing to move proactive measures. Thus, they may hold the line against new Federal bans but don't expect anything like national reciprocity or the hearing protection act to be a priority or come close to be acted upon.

Legislation to wipe out local state AWBs or mag bans - never happen.

Thus, rational arguments are not that useful. There is only an overwhelming take over of the Congress and then hoping that such a Congress has the guts and motivation to act. I doubt that even with the 60 votes, they would be proactive.

If they were and wiped away the threats of restrictive gun laws, they lose a vote getter and fund raiser.

 

[bikemutt]

The GOP just blathers and does nothing to move proactive measures. Thus, they may hold the line against new Federal bans but don't expect anything like national reciprocity or the hearing protection act to be a priority or come close to be acted upon.

I've made it very clear to my representatives where I stand, the chips will fall where they will. I have no further expectations from a representative republic.

 

[GEM]

They don't care. Unless a GOP candidate gets clearly taken out over a gun issue in a primary fight, they will just mouth platitudes. Then they will say they 'tried' and contribute more to continue the fight.

 

[plodder]

Maybe I missed it, but I don't see where the OP identified either the congressman/person or their party.

 

[PegLegPeat]

Assuming the OP is registered to vote from his listed location and assuming that he used the word "his" in a not-gender neutral way narrows this down to one, but that is a lot of assuming.......

 

[MachIVshooter]

The problem is that the left has adopted the fallcious narrative that people who would not commit murder with an unsuppressed firearm would be murders if they could do so more discreetly.

Would HPA result in some suppressors being used in murders? Probably. Would the number of unlawful homicides increase? Of course not. But it's the same nonsense they foist when they target EBRs, that somehow the weapon turns a non-violent person into a murderer.

Their other argument is that somehow people wouldn't be alerted to danger by the sound of gunshots, which is flawed in two ways. The first is, of course, that suppressors don't make the shot hollywood quiet. The second and perhaps more important aspect is that countless interviews with witnesses and survivors show us it's the pandemonium around them, not the gunshots, that makes people finally realize there's a problem. Suppressed or unsuppressed, gunshots in a room down the hall of a school or office building are very muffled, and most people's brains don't register what is going on in those situations based solely on non-verbal auditory input.

 

[RPRNY]

Maybe I missed it, but I don't see where the OP identified either the congressman/person or their party.

Did you read the letter?

 

[kimberkid]

I have very little faith that this will pass ... the government picks up hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue every year off suppressors alone ... now we are expecting them to not only drop it but refund everyone that has bought a suppressor in the last year and a half? OOOOOOK

My biggest fear is that they will look at the NFA blackmail fee of $200 ... which hasn't been raised in over 80 years ... and see this fee was put in place to prevent honest citizens from having NFA toys ... then raise it to $2,000 so that it will be fulfilling the original intent of the law.

 

[macgrumpy]

What I find interesting is that even the ATF has recommended that suppressors be removed from the list of controlled items because they say that it's been proven that suppressors present no threat to public safety and yet we keep hearing that people know that suppressors will be used to kill people. This is just another example of how our legal system has degenerated from a tool used to punish people for their antisocial acts to a tool used to punish people preemptively for what they might do.

 

[plodder]

Did you read the letter?

Yes

 

[Phaedrus/69]

I would love to see the HPA passed, but short of that I would be pleased so see approvals work like a NICS check- give 'em three days to approve with a lack of a decline in that time being an implied APPROVE. There's no reason that the records check for the tax stamp should take any longer than the check for a firearm. If necessary hire more ATF or have them farm the checks out to the FBI.