On March 27, 2017 McMorris Rodgers co-sponsored H.R. 367, the so-called “Hearing Protection Act.” Sounds benevolent, doesn’t it? Certainly that is what she and her 163 fellow co-sponsors, 160 Republicans and 3 lonely Democrats (two from Texas and one from Minnesota), would like us all to believe.
In the 1934, in response to the mayhem of the gangster era and the likes of Al Capone, Congress passed the National Firearms Act. Under that law, which stands up to judicial scrutiny to this day (at least as modified in 1968), fully automatic weapons, aka machine guns (hold down the trigger and bullet after bullet exits the barrel until the magazine runs out of cartridges), certain sawed-off rifles and shotguns, some other oddities…and silencers fell under complicated regulations and taxes but they were not banned or outlawed.
Silencers were defined as “any portable device designed to muffle or disguise the report of a portable firearm.” They are called silencers because they muffle the sound of gunshots.
If you’re shooting and want to protect your ears, there are excellent noise-cancelling headphones you can wear that require no registration. To argue that we need to reverse an eighty-three year old law so you can muffle the sound of your gun to protect your ears is a bald-faced lie. That such muffling would have resulted in more time to locate the shooter and more deaths in several recent shootings is blatantly obvious, but if you look around on the web you will find folks making that absurd claim.
Is there a great demand for repealing the restrictions on silencers from a broad cross-section of folks involved in shooting sports? Will silencers sell like hotcakes if the regulations are repealed? Highly unlikely. Readily available silencers will make us less safe, not safer.
So why is Ms. McMorris Rodgers co-sponsoring this ridiculous and ill-timed bill, H.R. 367? Doesn’t she have better things to do?
She’s co-sponsoring H.R. 367 because this bill is a flag waving in the vanguard of National Rifle Association’s war on any and all regulation of guns. No doubt it pleases those few of the NRA’s membership (guessed to be only around 5 million.) so rabid as to feed on the NRA devotees like the Redoubters. Co-sponsorship of H.R. 367 proves fealty to the cause of “protecting the Second Amendment.” McMorris Rodgers co-sponsorship demonstrates she is either gullible or devious. Gullible if she signed on believing H.R. 367 is actually about “Hearing Protection.” Devious if understands H.R. 367 is a sop to the crazies, an inadvisable repeal of law that works, and further believes her constituents are not paying attention.
I know many gun owners. I haven’t surveyed all of them, but so far I’ve only met one who would look me straight in the eye and argue for H.R. 367. If he had his way all gun regulation would be repealed and we would all be armed to the teeth. I reject that view of the future and I believe I am in a large majority of reasonable people, gun owners, sportsmen, gun fearers, parents, and students who reject that future, too.
Don’t let the Orwellian framing of this bill fool you. Co-sponsoring the repeal of important, long-standing gun legislation should be a disqualification for public office. To co-sponsor this repeal as we suffer mass shootings of children, students, concert goers, and, yes, policemen, is a stark demonstration of legislative malpractice and a dysfunctional moral compass.
Ask McMorris Rodgers what she was thinking.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry