Violence Policy Center's Latest Attack on Gun Industry Particularly Stupid

Ah, the Violence Policy Center.

If they're good for anything, it's giving me content to pick apart. It's not intelligently constructed content, mind you, but stupid stuff works for my purposes, too.

Their latest effort is trying to undermine the Hearing Protection Act.

See, they've got...concerns.

The new VPC study Silencers: A Threat to Public Safety details the dangers posed by these military-bred devices and the clear risk they present to law enforcement, our public institutions, and the general public. The study details:

• The history of firearm silencers in the U.S., as well as examples of crimes involving them, including the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in downtown Manhattan.
   
• The militarized marketing of silencers in ads, publications, and catalogs and how silencers are viewed as a key tool to introduce young children to guns.
   
• Data on the dramatic increase in civilian silencer ownership.

Pushing way beyond the limits of credulity and hypocrisy, the gun industry argues with a straight face that deregulating silencers is a “public health” issue and that their efforts are merely about protecting the hearing of shooters.

Not surprisingly, they never mention their hidden agenda.

Deregulating silencers would allow for the creation of a new category of easily available firearm — guns with integral silencers — that the gun industry hopes will allow them to resell current gun owners while appealing to potential new customers.

Of course, their "study" has a total of 17 crimes that involved suppressors, while noting the ATF traced over 400 in 2023. They acknowledge that some of those 400 were legal suppressors, but they don't really get into the actual numbers of them being used criminally compared to how many are in legal hands. That's an important distinction, in part because the only numbers we see definitively here are those 17 crimes compared to however many were traced.

Instead, they focus on crimes that often involve illegally obtained suppressors, with three others being interesting exceptions. One was a crew arrested for illegally manufacturing suppressors, and the other two were people who were trying to buy illegal suppressors for terrorist purposes.

In other words, most of them were people already breaking the law.

Let's also note that, according to The Trace, there were nearly 19,000 "gun deaths" in 2023 that weren't suicides. Some of those were unintentional, sure, but that's a tiny fraction of the total.

400 isn't even a pimple on the butt of that total.

And how many of those traced were suppressors that were stolen and recovered by the police? Those would get traced for obvious reasons, and I suspect that's what a lot of them were. Others were likely at crime scenes but weren't actually used, because suppressors aren't the most concealable things possible.

But notice the bolded section here. They're worried that the gun industry will be able to sell a whole new category of guns, ones with integral suppressors!!!!!!!

Bubba, those already exist. They're available for purchase now. I could buy one if I felt like going through the NFA paperwork.

So, I ask, so what? So what if the gun industry will profit from repealing a useless law? That's not a valid reason to trample on our rights. The liquor industry profited from the repeal of Prohibition. That wasn't a reason not to repeal it.

Seriously, this is all weapons-grade stupidity dressed up as something important.

Par for the course from this clown car of an organization.