Attack puts silencer bills in spotlight
Stalled legislation would relax rules, giving shooters advantage, some say
WASHINGTON — The gunman was perched up high in a 32nd-floor hotel suite, spraying gunfire down on an unsuspecting crowd at an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas. He killed at least 58 and wounded hundreds more — the worst mass shooting in modern American history.
As horrific as it was, gun control advocates say it could have been much worse under long-stalled gun legislation that would have made it easier for the shooter to get his hands on a firearm silencer.
Silencers — gun enthusiasts prefer “suppressors” — have been heavily regulated since the days of Al Capone and Prohibition. But the gun industry has been pushing to relax the rules on the devices, popularly associated with James Bond and Matt Damon’s “Bourne Identity” character.
Some law enforcement
groups object, saying that silencing or suppressing gunfire gives terrorists and other bad guys a critical tactical advantage over the cops in active-shooter situations such as the ones in Las Vegas and Dallas.
Among the first to raise the alarm nationally after the shootings in Las Vegas was Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, who said the use of silencers could pose an even graver threat to police and the public.
“They’ll say it’s not a silencer, it’s a suppressor,” Acevedo told the Chronicle. “No matter what you call it, it’s still going to mask where that weapon is. It’s going to mask the noise, the sound. … People won’t recognize it as gunfire, and law enforcement will have a greater challenge trying to pinpoint where the gunfire is coming from.”
Gun enthusiasts say that, in Las Vegas anyway, it would have made no difference. Either way, gun silencer legislation — championed by a number of prominent Texas Republicans — seems at an impasse for now, even though the Texas Legislature has already passed a measure to accommodate an anticipated change in federal law.
‘We’ll talk about that later’
Already, more than 177,000 Texans are registered to use silencers legally, twice the number of any other state. Nationwide, more than 1.3 million people are registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to purchase them, despite average waits spanning up to a year for a special $200 stamp.
Asked about gun silencer legislation after last Sunday’s attack, President Donald Trump said, “We’ll talk about that later.”
Congress has been no more eager to bring up to topic amid the horrific images of the carnage in Las Vegas. Asked about pending legislation that would make it easier for Americans to buy gun silencers, House Speaker Paul Ryan demurred.
“That bill is not scheduled now,” Ryan said at a Tuesday news conference, “I don’t know when it’s going to be scheduled.”
With Ryan in the news conference was House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, still recovering from severe wounds from a mass shooting attack on members of the GOP congressional baseball team in Alexandria, Va, this summer.
Scalise would say later that the attack in Las Vegas “fortified” his belief that new gun restrictions are not the answer to the mass shootings that have become a new constant in American life.
The Las Vegas gunman, 64-year-old retired accountant Stephen Paddock, had no known criminal or mental health history. He cleared all the necessary background checks.
Only one aspect of the shooting is likely to get federal review: Paddock’s use of so-called bump fire stocks that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire rapidly like fully automatic rifles. Several top lawmakers, including Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, said last week that they are willing to look at the new technology, a sentiment seconded by National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre, making a rare concession to further government regulation.
But with a Republican in the White House and GOP majorities in both houses of Congress, the question is not only whether lawmakers will pass new gun restrictions, but whether they will relax restrictions that are already on the books.
That question remains unsettled.
The tragedy in Las Vegas magnified attention on the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, a bill that passed out of the House Natural Resources Committee on a party-line vote on Sept. 13, scarcely two weeks before the Las Vegas shootings.
The bill, an echo of similar legislation that failed in the last Congress, would remove special licensing requirements for silencers, loosen restrictions on transporting firearms across state lines and deregulate certain types of “armor-piercing” ammunition.
The silencer provision is the one that’s received the most attention, being singled out by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and on several late-night comedy shows. “I guess Congress is thinking gun violence is out of control, how can we make it more quiet,” quipped The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah.
Texas supporters
Among the bill’s five co-sponsors are three Texans: Republicans John Carter and Pete Sessions, and Democrat Gene Green of Houston.
Green, an avid hunter who cochairs the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, said in an interview that he only put his name on the bill to support its underlying wildlife and hunting provisions. If the gun provisions aren’t removed, he said, he is likely to withdraw his support.
“My goal was to have a real sportsmen’s bill,” Green said, “not one that is overridden by gun issues.”
Unless, the silencer and other gun provisions are removed, Green predicted, the bill would have no chance of passage in the Senate, where the GOP’s 52-48 majority is too slim to overcome a likely Democratic filibuster, which takes 60 votes to break.
The Senate version of the bill, dubbed the “SHUSH Act,” has 18-cosponsors, including Cornyn and fellow Texas Republican Ted Cruz.
An earlier version of the House Sportsmen’s bill, called the Hearing Protection Act, had 165 co-sponsors, 24 of them from Texas, including Green and Henry Cuellar of Laredo, the only other Texas Democrat to sign on.
One name that is conspicuously absent is that of Republican Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, whose father was murdered in a courthouse shooting in South Dakota when he was a boy.
Like the two House bills, the Senate SHUSH Act has been championed as ear protection for hunters and other legitimate gun owners.
“There’s a lot of misinformation with regard to silencers,” Cornyn said. “Basically this is about ear protection. … This is not designed to be anything more than that.”
Alice Tripp, legislative director for the Texas State Rifle Association, an affiliate of the NRA, prefers the sound of the word “suppressor.” She notes that the devices were invented at the turn of the last century by Hiram Percy Maxim, who later got into the car muffler business. “On a large caliber firearm, it’s simply a muffler,” she said, adding, “You wouldn’t call a car muffler a silencer.”
Whatever it’s called, Tripp argues that in Las Vegas, given the distances involved, along with the crowd noise and country music, it would have made no difference.
But it does make a difference to Texas hunters, she said, who typically shoot in firing ranges or blinds and other enclosures where the report of their guns can be deafening.
“If firearms were invented today, OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) would require a suppressor,” she said.
Gun control advocates see little validity in the safety argument.
“Silencers are designed to give the offensive shooter a tactical advantage,” said David Chipman, a former ATF agent who is now a policy advisor to Americans for Responsible Solutions, an advocacy group formed by former astronaut Mark Kelly and former Rep. Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., who was critically wounded in a 2011 massshooting incident in Tucson.
“It doesn’t make the gun silent, but it does make it sound ungunlike,” Chipman said. “Like, ‘wow, what was that? A nail gun or something else?’ It causes confusion. … In a criminal situation, it doesn’t afford people the opportunity to immediately recognize they’re being shot at and need to seek cover.”
The devices can also obscure muzzle flash, a huge benefit in combat and commando operations, like the capture and execution of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
“We know these are potentially deadly devices,” Chipman said. “How do we know that? Why would Seal Team Six carry them unless they did something? It’s not just hearing protection.”
‘Pain of the process’
The industry also claims silencers can help people shoot straight.
The Silencer Shop, a dealer in Austin, features a Gun Digest article on its Facebook page showing that the devices “generally improve a firearm’s accuracy” by stripping away the turbulent gases from the muzzle.
Gun rights advocates argue that the proposed federal legislation would only change the National Firearms Act of 1934 by removing the long and cumbersome requirement of waiting for the $200 federal stamp. Buyers of silencer hardware would be treated the same as regular gun buyers, who are subject to background checks.
However private sales or exchanges of firearms don’t require background checks, a loophole that gun control advocates say would apply to silencers as well, possibly even making them available on the internet.
But whatever the current obstacles, demand is soaring, reflecting a growing marketing effort. While a federal stamp has been required since 1934, about one-third of all silencers registered with the ATF have been processed in the past two years.
Marketers like the Silencer Shop offer to ease the “pain of the silencer buying process” by requiring just the up-front payment of the tax stamp, with full payment due when the buyer’s application is approved.
They also tout a streamlined approval process “that generally requires less paperwork than buying a new refrigerator! (Plus, suppressors are way ‘cooler’ than fridges. Ha!)”