At the SHOT Show in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, I was talking to a man who knew his way around the world of firearms. He had been coming to the show every year and couldn’t remember, precisely, when he had last missed one.
“Fifteen years?” he said. “Maybe 20. Long time.”
What he looked for, every year, was the product—gun or accessory—that had grabbed people’s attention.
“I remember one year,” he said, “when all the buzz at the show was about new patterns in camouflage. Never seen anything like it. Crazy. There was a pattern for every season, every part of the country, every kind of habitat … seemed like you needed a whole camouflage wardrobe to be a hunter.”
And this year?
“Well, the AR-15 is huge. Many variations on a theme. But what really surprised me is the interest in suppressors. You know, those things that Hollywood calls ‘silencers.’ Bad guy screws one of those onto his Glock and when he shoots someone, it sounds like he is trying to hold in a sneeze. Pffft.”
It doesn’t work like that, he explained. But, then, Hollywood has a long record of getting it wrong on guns.
“You watch, though,” he said. “We’ll be hearing a lot more about suppressors.”
He had that right.
According to the Justice Department, there are 1.3 million suppressors registered in the United States. That is up by more than 400,000 over 2015. So who is buying those suppressors and why?
Well, if you put that question to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, she would tell you that bad people are buying those suppressors for bad reasons.
“These deadly gun silencers [sic] pose a huge risk to our enforcement and our communities,” she says and then promises, bravely, to “do everything I can to stop … ill-thought-out legislation that would allow more criminals to get their hands on these dangerous weapons.”
Well, it is a reach to call a suppressor a “weapon.” You could use it to beat someone over the head, perhaps, but there are easier ways of committing mayhem. A suppressor is an accessory to a firearm. But then, anti-gun politicians have long been obsessed with the cosmetic when it comes to firearms. The assault rifle ban, passed during the Clinton years, defined those weapons as having certain features such as bayonet lugs, pistol grips, and bipods. None of which make a weapon any more lethal. People who do know something about firearms liked to say that the anti-gun definition of an assault rifle was “a scary looking gun.”
As for the “ill-thought-out legislation” that Senator Gillibrand promises to resist, it is something called the “Hearing Protection Act,” which will make it less expensive and bureaucratically challenging for someone who wants to buy a suppressor to do so. Suppressors are already legal in 39 states. But buying one is hard.
How hard?
I asked my old friend Ted Hatfield who has been making guns since he was a kid and has recently branched out into suppressors.
“Well,” he told me, “if you want to buy one, you have to pay $200 to the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and nemesis in the universe of guns] and go through a background check, provide passport photos, get fingerprinted. Then you wait. Say I get the order, through a sporting goods store. I have to send in what is called a ‘Form 4.’ This includes stuff like a serial number. When it finally comes back, I have to do another form before I ship. Then, when the dealer gets it, he has to send in a form. The whole thing can take nine months. And you are talking about something that costs between $800 and $1,200.”
Is it worth it?
“Lots of people seem to think so,” said Hatfield, who hopes to ride the demand with his new company, Small Arm Technology. It is a long way from the black powder, muzzle-loading flintlocks he once made.
“The point of a suppressor is to reduce the noise of a gunshot. The technology is pretty simple and hasn’t evolved much since Hiram Maxim came up with it, early in the 20th century. It uses baffles to dissipate the gas expansion which causes most of the noise you hear from a gunshot. A suppressor can cut that noise down from 160 decibels to under 140. That’s still as loud as a jackhammer. We aren’t talking about silent kills, here.”
Still, Senator Gillibrand says that “When someone gets shot by a gun with a silencer, it’s quiet. Witnesses might not hear. Police will be less likely to track down the shooter.”
The ATF has a hard time pointing to cases of silencers being used criminally. It would actually like to get out of the business of regulating suppressors and make it easier for shooters to own them and people like Hatfield to make them.
But, then, Gillibrand and her colleagues never miss an opportunity to harass lawful gun owners.
“That,” says Ted Hatfield, speaking from a lifetime of experience, “is what they do. And they are real good at it.”
