The inclusion of the Hearing Protection Act in the House version of the reconciliation bill was a massive win. However, unless it's retained in the Senate's version, we're going to have a problem. Without the approval of both chambers of Congress, it's not happening.
So, we need the Senate to step up and retain it within the One Big Beautiful Bill.
To that end, a group consisting of gun rights advocates, physicians, and representatives of the gun industry are asking the Senate to follow through on what the House started.
“The National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) is an unconstitutional tax scheme that impedes the ability of all Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” the letter states. “Justified by Congress as a revenue generating measure, the NFA was enacted prior to Wickard v. Filburn, the landmark case that significantly expanded the scope of the Commerce Clause. In 1937, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the NFA as a revenue generating measure in Sonzinsky v. US. On behalf of the American Suppressor Association and law-abiding gun owners nationwide, we call on Congress to permanently remove suppressors from the unconstitutional NFA tax scheme by inserting Section 2 of the Hearing Protection Act into the reconciliation bill.”
As the letter explains, no tool can make a gunshot silent. Also mislabeled as silencers, suppressors simply reduce the dangerously loud noise of a gunshot to safer levels.
In fact, according to the National Hearing Conservation Association (NHCA): “Persons wearing conventional hearing protection are not without risk of NIHL [Noise Induced Hearing Loss] when using firearms. The noise reduction of hearing protection devices varies considerably across users and may provide significantly less protection from noise than the labeled noise reduction rating (NRR) suggests. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has recommended the NRR of conventional hearing protection be derated by 25% for earmuffs, 50% for formable earplugs, and 70% for all other earplugs to correspond to existing real- world data. NIOSH research has demonstrated that as many as 50% of persons using earplugs fail to achieve 25 dB of noise reduction for their ear plugs. However, using conventional hearing protection in conjunction with a suppressor can significantly reduce the risk of NIHL more than using either device alone.”
Of course, the usual suspects oppose this because they learned the real truth from movies, as opposed to those of us who have actually been around suppressors in use. What would we know as opposed to the Hollywood elite?
Frankly, I don't actually care what the anti-gunners think. They'll oppose anything that remotely looks like a restoration of our rights, and do so based on general principle. They don't need an actual, legitimate reason to oppose anything.
As for the HPA, I sincerely hope the Senate does leave the measure in the bill. I wouldn't mind them including the SHORT Act and getting that reconciled with the House version, too, so we can notch an even bigger win, but that's not likely to happen, unfortunately. I'd love to be wrong, though. I really would.
More realistically, I want us to hold the line on this one.
Then, when this doesn't result in the doom and gloom the anti-gunners say, we can work on the SHORT Act, then a full repeal of the NFA and the 1986 machine gun ban.
At that point, I don't know about you, but I fully intend to live the dream and buy all those once-forbidden firearms as quickly as I've got the cash.
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