GVPanorama - Quiet Killers
The gun industry wants to make silencers easier to own, despite their use in many high-profile crimes and mass shootings
As readers of Armed with Reason know, our main focus is on exposing and countering the “firehose of falsehood” — the gun lobby’s continuous and numbing barrage of disinformation meant to sow distrust and ultimately disinterest in fixes for America’s gun violence problem.
Think of the Trump Administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” as a legislative firehose of falsehood. The budget resolution passed by Congress in May is now making its way through the Senatorial slucier. It’s a massive contract that tries to implement nearly every far-right goal of the last 10 years into one bill.
The dark underbelly of such an overstuffed venture is that it’s nearly impossible for every politician and citizen to read and digest the whole thing. While it’s practically Congressional custom to slip pet provisions into big bills, this dense mountain of Easter eggs invites glazed-over eyes and contains more than the usual legalese asides that may go unnoticed and lead to severe damage, should the Big Beautiful Bill get passed and signed by the President.
For our purposes at GVPedia, it is the deregulation of firearm oversight in the Bill that is not getting anywhere near the coverage it should.
Today’s GVPanorama, from The Smoking Gun, is a thorough overview of just one of the scary steps backward in the bill — the silencer comeback. That’s right, that disturbing gun attachment from old spy movies that we thought we’d left in the past like the measles (oops) has been a deregulation focus of the gun lobby for awhile now.
“… silencers make it much easier for attackers to ambush and kill unsuspecting victims. This is why the federal government imposed strict registration and ownership requirements on the devices back in 1934. Yet as this report details, the gun industry and its backers have spent years trying to undo federal regulations and make silencers easier to own — all while attempting to rebrand silencers as harmless safety devices — and they have redoubled their efforts in the second Trump administration, jeopardizing public safety.”
Check out the full article here.
Photo via Potter & Potter Auctions.