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Only Hitmen and Serial Killers Need Silencers

The Mad Duo

It’s true. Only hit men and serial killers have any possible need to silence a firearm. Just ask Alexander Zaitchik.

He’s the author of a Salon.com article that for some inexplicable reason has started to make the rounds of anti-gun social media sites (and thankfully so). Unless you’re a CIA assassin or sniper with a black budget specops team there’s really no benefit to suppressing any gun – at least any gun a civilian should be allowed to own. Salon has long been known for its unbiased journalistic integrity, including a true masterpiece about how guns kill women2 written by “reproductive justice correspondent” Katie McDonogh. Quite a while back they published an article entitled Silencers: the NRA’s latest big lie1. In it the author explains the many evils of the silencer, which is of course typically the choice of “…Mafiosi hits, hidden snipers, and special ops ambush teams.” He even warns us of the dangers presented by the oncoming Second Silencer Age.

“The Second Age that produced these tools was commenced not by a charming dynastic American industrial engineer with wide interests like [Hiram] Percy Maxim. Rather it was born in the rural Georgia kill-gadget lab of a notoriously cracked and ruthless CIA black ops contractor, known in gun circles as the Wizard of Whistling Death.”

The Wizard of Whistling Death (aka Mitch WerBell). Holy shit. Clearly the kind of person who’d use a silencer is exactly the same sort who’d be into murder-for-hire, bestiality and post-necrophiliac necrophagia. The fact is, criminals would love to get their hands on silencers. The proliferation of silencers has already started a slaughter the likes of which we haven’t seen since Genghis Khan made it legal to own a composite bow and thumb ring without a special permit. Grunts: necrophagia.

It’s bad enough that far-right fringe groups (like the one that spawned the militia member pictured below) are able to use loophole trusts and gunshows to “reduce their signature” and make murder more easy.

This ongoing campaign by the NRA and their stooges, the American Silencer Association (now known as the American Suppressor Association in a clear attempt to act like they’re not responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people), can only have one possible outcome – an increased body count when it comes to an active killer event.

“By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing the strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder.”

That’s no mere hyperbole. If anything, Zaitchik is understating the problem. Murderers have gone to great length for decades to obtain silencers before committing mass murder. Unable to legally obtain one, many sociopaths will build or cobble together some sort of “field expedient” home-made silencer. Look at this degenerate bastard. He was caught on a nanny cam using a cat’s ass to muffle the report of his weapon (undoubtedly immediately prior to embarking on a killing spree at the behest of the CIA or maybe FEMA).

This is why we can’t have nice things. He’s not the first crook to use silencers in the commission of a crime. Remember when Officer Davis killed Lou Guzman with his silenced Colt Python? That’s all we need – a bunch of silenced .38 specials in the hands of street thugs, to say nothing of all those rifles shooting armor piercing M855 bullets. It’s bad enough when used by professional assassins or cartel “specialists.”

Why, you might ask, why are we bringing the Zaitchik/Salon article up now, when it’s two years old? For two reasons. First, we’ve seen an upswing in people linking to it and sharing it around. Why, we don’t know, but we figured we’d address it. Second, not only is the American Suppressor Association is about to hold their Second Annual Media Day near Nashville but the NRA is having an entire convention around the same time. A whole convention about not just guns, but silencers too! We must work together to stop the madness of what Zaitchek calls the “Gun Lobby’s Nouveau Bat Shit Style.” If not prevented, that aptly named Gun Lobby Nouveau Bat Shit Style will lead directly and inevitably to “….new and yet more lethal mutations in our national plague of gun violence.” There will be no avoiding it. The same thing happened when the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban ended! God help us if some hardened and dedicated desperado puts a silencer on a ghost gun.

They even want our kids to kill with silencers. It’s the same thing as child soldiers in Africa.

Oh…wait…

Um…

Never mind. Maybe Alexander Zaitchek is as big a window licker as the people who believe you can effectively silence a revolver, or that those pesky eternal capacity slaughterific killer magazines are going to depopulate the country. The truth is, silencers are awesome, and there are many good reasons to own one. Just ask many gun owners in Europe, or any of the tens of thousands of suppressor owners here in the U.S. who own one already. Buying a silencer may be about as much fun as a rectal exam, with all the forms and the NFA fees and whatnot, but shooting one is more fun than a rub-and-tug four-handed massage in the back room of Nancy’s Squat and Gobble; as such, we highly recommend it (especially if you’ve never done it before).

The fact is, if silencers were invented right now today the EPA and OSHA would make them required by law. In that alternate universe (where Chris Matthews is actually Christine and Spock has a beard), pro-Second Amendment people would do battle over the unfairness and illegality of mandatory sound suppression.

Those of our minions who like and use suppressors tend to have their own favorites. Silencers are like bullets, boobs and boots – everyone has a favorite brand, style, caliber or type. A couple of the lads are die-hard Gem-Tech fans who do everything but fap over their cans [editor’s note: confirmed that at least one does]. One of the girls recently fell in love with her Griffin Armament Revolution and another particularly low-browed minion swears by his OSS can and gets downright self-righteous about it – he may have an overdeveloped supraorbital ridge, but he knows good gun stuff when he sees it. Everyone loves the SF Ryder, and oh, and what’s not to like about the Ospreyand the Salvo? They’re awesome. As you may gather, there are a lot of good cans out there despite the periodic tomfuckery that goes on between a few of the companies that manufacture them or the occasional stupid utterance on Instagram. It would take longer than our ADD allows to list of them all. Feel free to comment about your favorite brand below (or even post a picture). It really is sad how many people out there – including “journalists” and “legislators” – who understand exactly fuck and all about what they’re talking about. Hell, Popular Mechanics couldn’t even spell suppression right in their recent article. WTF? Sure, that’s hardly the most egregious silencer-related thing we’ve seen (and admittedly, we misspell stuff all the time), but it’s disappointing.

So anyway, want to help stave off some of the more stoopid shit out there? Get involved with the American Suppressor Association. Quit wasting energy on the semantic argument of “silencer vs. suppressor” and apply it to something that matters. Call ’em muzzle mufflers if you want, who gives a shit?

You can learn more about the American Suppressor Association on their website, on their Facebook page or via their Instagram account. Make sure you follow them on Twitter and check out their YouTube channel too. Seriously – don’t just bitch about all the misinformation out there. Do your part to preempt or correct it. You don’t have to own a can to understand how it works and/or explain it to the next poor ignorant (and perhaps well-meaning) hippie you run into. Here are a few educational sites.

The American Suppressor Association has an in depth Education page – that’s where you should start.

An unlikely but well written page about silencers can actually be found at TVtropes.org right here – it addresses some of the stupidity put forth by Hollyood.

Gem-Tech maintains and updates a great map at Your Right to Silence and has a page that describes how Silencers Do More Than Save Your Hearing.

There are no doubt many others.

That’s all for now. You don’t have to thank us, though your adulation is well deserved. We wake up every morning this awesome and we’re not inclined to apologize for it. ______________________________________________________________

1Silencers: the NRA’s latest big lie (Silencers could give the next Adam Lanza even more time to kill – but to the NRA, they protect kids’ hearing)

2 “Where there are more guns, more women die“: A Harvard public health expert breaks down the data on firearms and women’s safety.

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