Reasonable column on suppressors from the Chicago Tribune

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M-Quigley
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Joined: Wed Jun 24, 2015 10:06 pm
Location: Western Ohio

Reasonable column on suppressors from the Chicago Tribune

Post by M-Quigley »

Also it's two years old, it's still very relevant to today due to the shooting in Virginia. There are articles and opinions that state that only forty some crimes are committed each year with suppressors, but the real number is actually less than that. When I checked into the source of that number, there are forty some crimes associated with suppressors each year, (as in possession of an unregistered suppressor is a crime, etc) NOT forty some murders are committed each year with legally owned suppressors. The real number per year is more like one on average, at least up to 2017. It's all the more ironic considering the Chicago Tribune is not exactly considered a conservative or pro gun publication, and this is not some opposing editorial from someone who doesn't work for the paper.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/ ... olumn.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
If the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had been around in the 1930s, gun rights lawyer Stephen Halbrook quipped to The Washington Post, it probably would have mandated their use.
Chicago has a lot of bloodshed, including 762 homicides and more than 3,500 shootings, last year, but silencers figure in little or any of it. Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, told me, "We seldom recover silencers. Sometimes you may get a gun with a makeshift silencer, but even that is rare."

A report last year by the Violence Policy Center cites a handful of shootings in which silencers were used. But the paucity of examples confirms that they are not of great interest to criminals. An earlier study by Paul A. Clark published in the Western Criminology Review found only two federal court cases involving the use of a silencer in a murder between 1995 and 2005.

He also unearthed eight cases in which "a silencer was actively used during commission of a crime but not used to physically injure anyone." That works out to one serious silencer-related crime per year, in a country that in 2005 had 16,740 homicides and 417,000 robberies.

Supporters of the status quo say this merely proves the effectiveness of strict regulation. But improvised versions can be fashioned out of flashlights, oil filters or metal conduits. YouTube has numerous videos providing guidance for the do-it-yourselfer.



If silencers were truly valuable to ordinary criminals, there would undoubtedly be a thriving black market and plenty of crimes committed with them. But the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced only 125 silencers in 2015 — not all of them connected to crimes. As Clark notes, a minimally clever miscreant can get the same noise reduction by wrapping his gun in a towel or pillow.

Any useful technology can be put to villainous ends. But the existing rule on silencers is a major hassle for the law-abiding and an irrelevance to criminals.
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