Be Vewwwy, Vewwy Quiet

I decided to give myself a nice Christmas present. A silencer.

I took a precision rifle course a few years back, and I noticed a couple of things. I was the only person shooting an AR-platform gun instead of a real precision rifle (the question “Is it deer season?” was heard), and silencers seemed to be everywhere except on my gun’s muzzle.

I didn’t think too much of it. After all, ear plugs and muffs are cheap, and smart people use protection even with silencers. I was also not excited about the extreme cost or the long wait OR getting myself on yet another secret list somewhere. Today I decided to give in. I ordered a rimfire silencer, and I am planning to pick one up for bigger guns.

OKAY, PUT ME ON THE LIST NOW. THANKS.

Why rimfire? Mainly, it was a much easier decision. The world of silencers for bigger guns is more complicated, and they cost more. I still have not figured it out. What kind of muzzle attachment do I want? How will it work with a brake? Lots of questions. With rimfire, you just decide which one you want and order it.

Do I need it? Of course not. Plain old ear plugs are fine for a .22. But silencers are fun.

There are companies that make buying a silencer easy. You can actually have a silencer delivered to your door. You pay. They send you a kit with a government form and an SASE. You fill out the form and mail it. Then Uncle Sam drags his feet for eternity, because it’s a terrible thing when citizens are allowed to protect their hearing, and eventually, the vendor mails you the silencer.

I guess mailing a silencer is okay in spite of the NFA because you can’t actually shoot someone with it. I don’t know, though. I know you can’t have a new pistol mailed to your house.

It’s all pretty stupid. In parts of gun-phobic, herd-mentality Europe, silencers are not regulated. People can order them from websites the same way we order socks from Bass Pro. They’re also inexpensive compared to American silencers. A silencer is a can with baffles in it, so they probably cost about $20 to make. Our bizarre laws somehow make it easy for manufacturers and sellers to jack up the price.

The NFA is stupid, in general. I have learned a little about it. I found out why it bans rifles and shotguns with short barrels.

Once upon a time, our Congress was so stupid, it tried to get rid of all concealable guns. It wanted to get rid of all pistols. Imagine how criminals would have jumped for joy, seeing the rest of us suddently rendered defenseless. Because a short rifle or shotgun could take the place of a pistol, Congress tried to get rid of them, too. Then the pistol prohibition got the axe, perhaps because someone remembered we had a Constitution, but Congress, being stupid, left the business about short barrels in place.

Congress restricted a class of firearm virtually no one wanted or used. Years later, people decided they wanted short weapons for use in close quarters like homes and businesses, so a law which hadn’t been much of a bother suddenly became a major pain to many law-abiding citizens.

This is my understanding, anyway, and I am too lazy to check to see if it’s right.

While I was taking my class, I observed something I had already heard about, which almost no leftists believe. I noticed how loud “silenced” or “suppressed” guns were. They were very loud. Well able to damage hearing. But they were a lot quieter than unsuppressed guns and therefore less likely to defeat hearing protection.

Leftists think a silenced rifle sounds like a stapler. This idea comes from TV shows and movies, and fictional silenced guns are said to be “Hollywood quiet.” Maybe there is a gun out there that really is that quiet, but the general rule is that they are obnoxiously loud. You can’t run into an airport, shoot 15 people, and run out with no one noticing, regardless of what great geniuses like Whoopi Goldberg and Jake Tapper may think or say.

I don’t expect Hollywood quiet, but I would like to look after my ears reasonably well.

The silencer I ordered is not going to produce the same sad results as silencers attached to high-powered rifles. A .22 round is a lot quieter to begin with, so, if things go as advertised, I should be able to shoot rimfire without ear plugs. Just like I did about 5,000 times when I was a kid. That will be fun.

I only have one .22 which is threaded for a silencer. I guess I can have some other rimfires threaded. I wonder if I should try putting a barrel on the lathe. It would be a good experience even if I screwed up, and barrels can be replaced.

It’s kind of tough to get a silencer for a big gun now. The Obama Effect has not completely worn off. Covid helped keep it going. Many things that were hard to get a couple of years back are now readily available, but many others are still hard to find. The selection of .22 cans is good, but if you have a big rifle, you may have to settle for your third or fourth choice.

The big challenge now is to live long enough to see the paperwork clear.

It’s absurd for our government to hinder and delay the procurement of safety devices which are of no help at all in committing crimes, but we all know how weird the government is.

Speaking of guns and government, I saw Alan Dershowitz say something that wasn’t all that brilliant yesterday.

Dershowitz has a Youtube channel for some reason. He posts videos in which he tries to correct the world. Basically, he can’t adjust to the fact that everyone else is so much less intelligent than he is, so he wastes his time trying to set them straight. I’m sure that will work. Perhaps not the most productive way to spend one’s final days, but he seems to enjoy it.

Ordinarily, I find my chosen profession boring, because it is, but I watch Dershowitz from time to time because it’s nice to see someone with a fairly big platform saying things that should already be obvious to every lawyer in America.

I forget what the video was about, but at the end, he answered a question about the Second Amendment. He said something about how unrealistic it was to hope to fight tyranny with rifles. Apparently, he thinks it can’t be done, so there is no reason to let Americans go about armed.

It was a pretty dumb thing to say, but it goes to show what happens to people when they forget which lane they’re supposed to be in. Dershowitz is great with law, but that doesn’t mean he has any idea how to fight a just rebellion or any other kind of rebellion. It’s the kind of distinction you would hope a top legal mind would make automatically.

Maybe if he were not a leftist, he would have been inclined to do some research. He’s a very fair man, but everyone is somewhat biased.

I will give my take. I’m not a military or political expert, either, but I’m also not a sheltered leftist professor, and I have a little bit of common sense. I’ll post some assertions which may overlap to some degree.

1. Rifles can do wonders when pointed at the right people, so it’s careless to say rifles can’t be used to overthrow a government. Get to the right people, point rifles at them, and a lot of things may start to go your way.

2. Rifles can be used to get bigger weapons. Obvious.

3. If there is ever a just rebellion here, it is a certainty that many cops and military people will be part of it, because they lean right and fascists lean left. Fascist leftists like oppressive government, so they’re not the ones who will rebel. They’d be rebelling against themselves. You can’t fight the establishment when you are the establishment. The rebels would have cops and soldiers on their side, and that means they would also have things like jets, artillery, and tanks. Are tanks artillery? Not sure. Don’t care. Anyway, once the rebellion started, rebels working for the government would provide a lot of larger weapons.

4. In the event of a rebellion, other countries will take a look, and they will take sides. What do meddling countries do in civil wars? They supply arms. Again, the rebels would not be relying solely on duck guns and Glocks.

5. Even if you have big weapons, you still need rifles and people who know how to use them. Obvious? The only way that can happen in a reasonable amount of time is if private citizens are already armed.

6. Guerrillas who started out with small arms have caused a great deal of misery for overconfident superpowers.

7. It’s not easy for a country to fight rebel guerrillas in a civil war. In a normal war, everyone shows up in easily-recognized uniforms, and most of the fighting takes place at well-defined fronts. When you find your enemy, you can usually bomb the daylights out of him, because his people are concentrated and separated from yours. You can even bomb his cities. In a rebellion, people will wear what they wear now. They’ll be everywhere. They’ll be anonymous and under cover. They may work for you by day and kill your people by night. There will be no front. There will be no homogeneous rebel cities for you to bomb. Bomb a city, and you’ll kill your own people. The idea that you’ll be able to release every weapon you have and wrap things up in a hurry is absurd. If that kind of thing worked in civil wars, Vietnam would be a state.

Rebels in America could mount a successful coup, and if that didn’t work out, they would have a very good chance of dividing the country permanently, like Korea. If a rebellion were just, pro-2A people would turn out to be on the right side of history. They would be the people who saved whoever got saved from the tyrants. The founding fathers of Florexas.

8. The Second Amendment is not just about tyranny. It’s also about self-defense, and the best information we have tells us gun ownership and carrying firearms do much more to protect the weak and innocent than they do to empower the cruel. America has a people problem. We have several big demographics that commit a huge amount of violent crime, persistently. Blacks alone commit most murders. There is no hope we can change the population segments that are most prone to violence, so it would be sick and immoral to disarm the rest of us in the vain hope that somehow, disarmament would trickle down to people who never cared about the law to begin with. If Professer Dershowitz ever had to face a loaded shotgun in his bedroom, maybe he would adjust his beliefs a bit.

Ask Professor Dershowitz a purely legal question, and you’re sure to get a smart response. Ask him how guns and wars work, and the situation deteriorates fast. He veers dangerously close to the Behar/Feinstein* Vortex**. You find that he puts his metaphorical pants on one leg at a time, just like lesser attorneys.

Everyone is stupid about something.

He may be uninformed about guns and unaware of his bias, but least he’s not self-deceiving and willfully blind, like most prominent leftists we see commenting on this issue. He tries to be consistent and honest, so he offends just about everyone eventually. That makes him worth listening to occasionally, even if law is boring. Which it is.

*”We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines.” — Dianne Feinstein

**”If you shoot with an AR-15, let’s say you shoot a deer, you can’t eat it because you basically demolish the animal.” — Joy Behar