Loving Those Common-Sense Gun Laws

I don’t know if I should write about this, but common sense has never been my long suit, and I have already been banned by the DoD and Communist China, so I know it’s too late to worry about being on lists: I bought a couple of silencers.

I didn’t bother paying for tax stamps. I just went on Aliexpress and clicked a few buttons. I also ordered some grenades. The neighbors throw loud parties.

Of COURSE I paid for tax stamps. Put down your car keys, agents. I’m glad I paid. I think it’s wonderful that I was forced to pay $400 for permits for two completely harmless safety devices that are available for around $150, without permits, in gunphobic Western Europe.

It’s pointless to worry about your silencer finding its way onto a list, because they won’t let you have it until it’s on one list and the feds have tried to get you on another. The BATF knows you have the silencer, and just to be pure jerks, they notify your local sheriff. No state requires your sheriff’s consent for you to have a silencer.

The joke is on the BATF. If they think Sheriff Billy Woods is keeping a gun registry, they don’t know him very well. He encourages citizens to shoot burglars, and he made his department start giving civilians shooting classes.

So why did I buy silencers? Obviously, because I want to sneak into the houses of innocent people and kill them without making a sound.

Oops; sorry. I think I was channeling Elizabeth Warren or some other gun ignoramus. If you want to kill people quietly, a suppressed firearm is not going to work.

Should people be disturbed that I was banned by the DoD of the United States of America AND Communist China? Is anyone bothered by the fact that our military complex is just as threatened by my blog as a regime that has done things like forced abortion and the Cultural Revolution? Who will ban me next? North Korea? Andrew Tate?

As far as I know, the first time I heard a “silenced” weapon was in 2020, at a precision rifle class. I was “that guy.” Everyone else had at least a Ruger Precision Rifle, and most had Nightforce scopes. I showed up with a Leupold varmint scope in MOA and an LR-308 with a mil-spec trigger. A guy down the row from me asked if it was deer season.

A mil-spec trigger is the worst possible trigger you can manufacture for our military and expect to be paid for it. It will not provide optimal results in precision shooting. A good precision rifle will have something better. I believe I paid $200 for my only really good trigger.

Back when I took my class, a Ruger Precision Rifle, or RPR, was THE way to creep into precision rifle from the bottom. They exploded onto the market for something like $900. That was an insane bargain. You can spend up to, I would guess, infinity on a good rifle if you want to. You can have one built. You can buy a high-end gun already made. Grabbing a $900 gun and heading straight to the range was a big deal when the RPR came out.

Some guys in my class had weird guns you can’t just snag at Bass Pro on the way home from work. They had weird calibers, too. They had .338 Lapua and .300 Win Mag.

And they had silencers.

Not everyone had a silencer. Some just had brakes. The brakes were annoying, because if you’re next to a guy with a brake, it may redirect the blast from the front of the gun to your location.

The “silenced” guns were surprisingly loud. I knew not to expect the ridiculous “pyoonk pyoonk” sounds I had heard in movies, but these things sounded like rifles. If someone were shooting a suppressed 6.5 Creedmoor in my pasture right now, I would hear it through my double-paned windows.

I don’t know how moviemakers make those funny fake silencer sounds. They always sound exactly the same. Did someone record a cat sneezing in 1960? Weird.

People should be astonished that in 2024, there are still legislators stupid enough to think silencers are really silencers. If they’re that wrong about silencers, imagine how wrong they are about everything else. They’re not even trying.

Well. I guess you already know how wrong they are about everything else.

If you don’t hate the BATF, I have a story that will change your mind. One of my instructors told it. He was a military veteran who had, presumably, killed a lot of terrorists, risking his life for you and me. He was teaching a class. A BATF agent was taking the course. He saw the instructor’s silencer, and he demanded, right then and there, to see his paperwork. If the instructor had gotten lazy and left it at his house, he would have had to abandon the course and go for a drive. The law requires you to present your papers to the BATF on demand.

I got myself a silencer for a Ruger Charger pistol, which is more like a rifle than most pistols. It shoots .22LR. Tons of fun. Very short and handy. I put a Sig red dot on it. I don’t think I could hit a squirrel with it with sufficient accuracy to be humane, but it is the ultimate plinking pistol. Buy a 12-pack of store brand diet soda, toss the cans in your yard, step back 75 feet, and go to town. Can’t beat it.

I can’t remember why I chose to start with .22LR. A .22 is not very loud to begin with. But it sounded like fun, and it made for a cool utility cart gun. It was also a lot cheaper than a .308 can.

We silencer experts call silencers “cans.” Try to keep up with the cool kids.

Here’s something crazy: the BATF has started speeding up the approval process. Under Biden, no less. What on Earth is happening? Someone call Bill Murray and see if cats are living together with dogs.

Here I am, at the beginning of the apocalypse, still making apocalypse jokes.

It hasn’t been long since they were telling us to expect a silencer application to take at least 11 months. Here’s the current low figure: two days.

Two. Days.

How is that possible? The BATF is known to be hostile to gun rights, and the man who runs it is an old Jewish liberal who can’t tell one end of a pistol from the other. On the other hand, I’m sure they like money. Maybe they’re like the Patent and Trademark Office, which gets to keep whatever you send it. Faster processing equals increased consumer interest.

My .22 application has been approved, and by the time the can gets here, the process will have taken about 7 months. I decided to go for a .308 silencer as well. I hope it’s faster.

The company I used told me individual applications are typically very fast now, but gun-trust applications can still take 4 months.

What is a gun trust? I don’t really understand it because I don’t care enough to study, but more or less, you pretend you’re an organization, and the organization owns the silencer. This makes it easier to allow other people to use the silencer and receive it when you die. Something like that. I did a trust. I guess I should not have, but I don’t want my wife to have problems with her suddenly-illegal silencers if I get struck by lightning or offer to testify against Boeing.

I’ve learned a lot of things about silencers. One important thing: if you have a lot of calibers, get a .308 silencer. You can use it for anything down to .17 HMR. I’m not sure why anyone buys a .223 silencer. The .22LR silencer makes some sense, because it’s very small and relatively cheap.

Sooner or later, I plan to shoot big guns again. I do not trust ear plugs and muffs. I don’t think they work very well. I think most gun owners are poorly educated about such things. If your ear protection is rated at -30 dB when used perfectly, and your gun’s report is 40 dB past the safe zone, maybe you’re fooling yourself.

Whatever hearing I still have, I would like to keep, even though I am married.

I’m paying a screaming fortune for these things. That’s a shame, and Democrats should be held accountable for denying people protection at a reasonable cost. I thought about it, and I decided it was better to get gypped than to go deaf.

In some places in Europe, silencers are not merely legal; they are mandatory. Leftists think Western Europe is paradise. They think we should turn America into a big IKEA. If Europe is perfect, how can Europe be wrong about hearing safety?

The literature on the .308 can I ordered says it suppresses .308 down to ear-safe levels. I find that hard to believe, based on what I’ve heard with my own ears. I hope it’s true, but even if it isn’t, it should make my other protection do a much better job.

It’s amazing, the shooting technology we have now. I’m an amateur bozo shooter, but with my low-end precision rifle, I can shoot into 1/2″, center to center, all day at 100 yards on a reasonably calm day. The triggers, barrels, and cartridges are that good. Not two inches. Not one inch. Half an inch. Makes me wonder what a really good shooter with better stuff can do.

He can’t shrink my groups by more than half an inch. That’s for sure.

To do better at longer distances, you need more than good equipment. Past 100 yards, you need to be able to deal with things like wind and heat mirage and so on. I’m a rock star at 100 yards. Don’t ask me about 500.

The new cans will suppress every rifle caliber I shoot. I’ll have to think about getting some barrels threaded, though, because not every barrel I have is silencer-ready.

If you’ve been wanting a silencer, this may be a good time to get one. And the sooner you do, the less likely you are to have hearing trouble.