Congress will vote on making silencers & armor piercing bullets easier to buy

[bronxiteforever]

September 15, 2017 NYT

This week, when a House committee approved a bill making it much easier to buy gun silencers. The measure is now on the way to the floor for a vote, and about time. This is obviously one of the nation’s great unmet needs. Seldom does a day go by when you don’t hear people bitterly complaining about how much trouble it is to muffle the sound of their shooting.

We’re talking about the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, adorably nicknamed Share. It has a bunch of hair-raising provisions, one of which would make it easier to buy armor-piercing bullets. (We will stop for a moment to contemplate the fact that it is not currently impossible to buy armor-piercing bullets.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/guns-silencers-congress.html

[Tanuki]

1. One of Dotard Jr.'s favorite issues

..."And we haven’t gotten yet to the provision that’s causing the most outcry. That’s the one about improving access to gun silencers. This is a cause long championed by Donald Trump Jr. We have not really seen much of Junior lately, what with all those controversies over meetings with Russians during the presidential election campaign, and we sort of miss him. Pretty soon there are going to be so many members of the family testifying before congressional investigations that all we’ll have left is Eric.

The big argument by Junior and the other advocates is that the sound of a gun firing is so loud it endangers the hearing of hunters. “Right now we are in a situation where it seems … that sportsmen have to choose between damaging their hearing and being able to hunt, shoot, target practice,” said Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming. (Hey, somebody else we have not heard from for ages. And it is impossible to resist saying that Liz will do for gun safety what her dad, Dick, did for Iraq.)
.......

Think about the Giffords’ story for a minute. When you get down to the basics, Congress is now considering a bill to make mass shootings less noisy.
.......

The answer is that gun manufacturers and gun dealers are having a tough year. Democratic presidents are great for their business. While there were about three-quarters of a million guns sold in the month of the Sept. 11 attacks, there were more than a million sold in the month Barack Obama was first elected and the gun lobby stirred up paranoia about new regulations. Dealers sold two million in the January after Obama’s re-election, and sales jumped again dramatically at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton looked like a shoo-in.

Now we’re in the Trump era. “Sales are declining, and the industry needs a new source of profit,” said Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the Senate’s top gun safety advocates. Silencers can cost as much as $1,000, and given the fact that there are about 300 million guns in the country available for silencing, we’re talking about quite a potential boom."....

[bronxiteforever]

2. Brilliant points! Thanks

[smirkymonkey]

6. Only when people start shooting politicians will our gun laws change for the better.

Until then, expect them to vote in favor of the gun manufacturers.

[MiniMe]

3. I'm sure that the police and police unions are all in favor of armor piercing bullets

if needed

I thought the RW nutjobs were all in favor of protecting the police.

[Cosmocat]

7. THIS is one of the the endless array of examples

of core "conservative" constituencies that just pass of the crazy ass shit republicans do that negatively impacts them.

[hack89]

4. Here is the text of the bill

https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2406/text

[dalton99a]

5. Well, it is important to protect the hearing of victims as well as shooters