The Silence of the Lambs

 Years ago, on the Discovery Channel, there was a show about a small gun shop in Louisianna. Mighta been called "Son's of Guns" (?) as it was a family store and gunsmithing operation. Not a mom-and-pop shop as there was no mom, just a pop. Pop was an ex-Marine and he was hard charging but could have stood to lose 40 or 50 pounds. Ex-Marines come in all shapes and sizes. We had one deliver us some paint on a job once. I think the whole crew fell in love with him. I'd say he was early 60's but still a lean, mean fighting machine, with the flat-top military haircut and tattoos.  We chatted him up and he had been a door-gunner on Huey helicopters, landing in hot LZ's , his job would be to spray the weeds with an M-60 machine gunfire in case there would be enemies hiding in ambush. He was certainly someone the VC wanted to kill if they could. And he was the nicest, most unassuming guy you'd ever want to meet. No cocky confidence. Did not take the opportunity to regale us youngsters with war stories- though we would have loved to hear them. It was just something he did for probably two years of his life. Didn't define him- to him.

Will, on the show, was different. He was all about being an ex-Marine. I don't think he claimed combat as age-wise, there was no major war to claim for his time in the service. He just liked being an ex-Marine for the panache. 

Discovery Channel shows like to make everything more interesting than it really is. They take liberties with reality. There was the "Amish Mafia" show, that I think was based on Weird Al Yankovic's, "Amish Paradise" which was a take on "Gangster's Paradise" that the show runners had to meld and take seriously so that you would too. There was another one about a pretend motorcycle gang in San Diego. I really liked hate-watching that one. It was horrible. 

On "Son's of Guns" they were always doing something weird with guns and weapons. A guy came in once and wanted a flame thrower. Will wanted to make one! It turns out you can own and use a flame thrower in the US. Who knew? 

The biggest deal they had though, was modifying an AK-47 assault rifle to be internally suppressed. You can't just slap on a suppressor/'silencer' onto the barrel of an AK as you can with many other guns. The gas recirculation would be compromised and yada-yada. Hard to do, not impossible. The question is why you would want to go to all this trouble.

The answer was that so women could fire the AK at the range and not be burdened by having to wear hearing protection. I'm not making that up. 

Though I missed my range time this past week, hearing protection is a must. Guns are LOUD. They are louder inside a building. You wear hearing protection so that you don't spend the rest of your life saying, "ANSWER THE DAMN PHONE!!" everywhere you go in. So, you have to ask why anyone would need a silencer. Well, as a veteran of way too many gunfights on the internet, you are not allowed to ask why a gun owner would need anything gun related, because the answer is that the Second Amendment says you can. One seemingly simple sentence but the "...shall not be infringed..." part is cited as saying it all in the 2A. They'll usually ignore the "militia" part, but never the " shall not be infringed" part. Many gun owners claim this means you can have anything the government has, up to and including, F-16 fighter jets. Oh, for God's sake...

In the current house bill actually titled the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act", this republican congress wants to eliminate the $200 tax on 'silencers'. That'll save some citizens some money!

A word about silencers here. Forget the movies where the gun goes "pfttt" and the victim falls to the ground, and everyone confusedly looks around and wonders, "What the heck happened to him??!!" until another guy drops and they soon figure out that somebody is shooting at them! That's Hollywood. Silencers are actually flash suppressors that mask the flash of the explosion that is a round coming out of the barrel of a gun. In war, you don't want the enemy to know where you're shooting from. Modern combat long guns come with them built in, but the screw-on 'silencers' available do a better job of flash suppression. As a byproduct of that, there is sound suppression. It's just nowhere near that "pffttt" that Hollywood would have you believe. Still quieter though.

So, who needs this? You know you are not supposed to ask that...

But I'll answer it. People who want to kill as many people as quickly and quietly as they can need this. I don't know if silencers are 50-state legal, so you can already get them, but the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act' (if passed) would mean you could get them $200 cheaper. It's a victory bone for gun nuts who want to stick it to the man, even though most of the nuts love the man who is "the man" now.  Trump and them still act like they're fighting Joe Biden and Obama. Ever notice that? Even Trump can't believe he's president again.

My concern is for noisy crowds of protestors being fired upon by paramilitary weirdos who already have quieter guns to kill people. That could happen without this bill. The bill only makes it cheaper. Life's cheap enough in the US, but it's fixin' to get cheaper. Those noisy, vibrant crowds protesting the dismantling of US democracy might soon be subject to the bullets of fascist defenders. I always thought these silencer fans simply wanted more quiet kill opportunities was all. I think I'm right. Hope we don't see. I think we will.