Despite what the movies and liberal Left would have you believe, silencers—or more accurately, suppressors—do not fully silence the sound of a gunshot. Suppressors are to guns what mufflers are to cars. On average, suppressors lessen a 165 dB sound into a 135 dB sound—the equivalent of going from a jet engine to a jackhammer.
That information is readily available, of course, but anti-gun groups would prefer to have you believe the movie scene where the bad guy fires off a round in a crowded room and not a single person hears the gunshot. One recent example is an editorial posted in The Salt Lake Tribune by Linda K. Newell, board member of the Gun Violence Prevention Center.
Newell rails against the Hearing Protection Act—calling suppressors nothing more than a “profit area” for the gun industry—and claims that their deregulation would “make killing easier.” She also wonders how many more deaths will occur when “silencers are on the streets and in the hands of youth gangs and other criminals.” Acknowledging the fact that suppressors are rarely used in criminal shootings, Newell absurdly argues that the reason is that most criminals are prevented by law from purchasing them. In other words, criminals with illegal guns who use them to commit illegal, violent acts are deterred by the fact that obtaining a suppressor would be illegal.
If only there was a suppressor for uninformed, misguided gun control rhetoric.
