Cortland
The budget bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate has rightly drawn a lot of criticism for its sharp cuts to Medicaid. But what has largely escaped the public’s attention is the part of the bill that would aid mass shooters, terrorists, and assassins by deregulating gun silencers.
Silencers on guns make it harder for ordinary civilians and police to hear the sound, see the flash, and quickly detect the location of the shooter. Thus they can serve to facilitate mass shootings.
In Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 2019, a gunman who shot and killed twelve people used a silencer. At first, those present didn’t even know that a shooting was underway. Some of them began running but didn’t know which way to go because they hadn’t heard the gunfire.
The provision added to the bill by Republicans would overturn part of the 1934 National Firearms Act, scrapping a $200 federal excise tax on silencers and removing them from registration. This will allow the gun industry to profit and criminals to elude law enforcement. Violent crime and gun deaths will increase. This is not the direction we want to go. Firearms are already the leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens.
Legalizing silencers would add to President Donald Trump’s abysmal record on crime and gun safety. In his first Inauguration address, he promised, “the American carnage stops right here.” But instead, in the last year of that presidency, the murder rate increased more than at any time since the FBI began keeping records. About 80 percent of murders are committed with firearms, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Unfortunately, legalizing silencers fits the pattern of Trump’s second term gun policy. He weakened the Brady background check system by revoking President Joe Biden’s Zero Tolerance Policy. Under it, the licenses of gun dealers could be cancelled if they failed to run background checks as required or sold guns to prohibited people. And Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would even allow “irresponsible and dangerous gun sellers who lost their licenses because of willful violations of the law to get back into business,” as the group Brady United put it. They can simply reapply.
The Trump Administration also recently settled a court case initiated by the National Association for Gun Rights. It will allow the sale of a trigger device (the “forced reset trigger”) that replaces the standard trigger of the AR-15 rifle and makes it fire much more rapidly. According to a report by NBC News, ATF “determined that the devices allow a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle to fire as fast as a military M-16 in automatic mode.” They are even more deadly than bump stocks, devices that the Trump Administration banned after they were used by the shooter who killed fifty-eight people and injured more than 800 at a Las Vegas country music festival in 2017. Unfortunately the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this sensible restriction.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia on June 9 filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s decision to allow the sale of forced reset triggers, saying this would violate federal law, endanger residents and law enforcement, and worsen gun violence.
House and Senate Republicans have also introduced national concealed carry reciprocity bills. These would allow anyone who can carry a concealed weapon in one state, to carry in any state—dangerously overriding state laws. But a study looking at thirty-four states that relaxed restrictions on concealed carry found that the rate of assaults increased by an average of 9.5 percent over the expected rate in the first ten years. More Americans will be killed or injured if more people are carrying guns in many more states.
What can be done? We can help protect ourselves and stop these dangerous policies by calling our legislators, attending town hall meetings, and donating to local and national gun violence prevention organizations. Instead of weakening our gun safety laws, we need to protect and strengthen them.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.