You may remember Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner. If not, those who oppose making it easier and less expensive to buy a silencer want you to remember the cop who went seriously rogue. That’s because Officer Dorner is the only example they can find of a bad guy using a silencer to shoot and kill innocent folk.
That’s made him the anti-silencer poster child. Here’s how Mother Jones spins it . . .
Ever since gun silencers were first regulated in the 1930s, they have been used only rarely in violent crimes, with one notable recent exception:
In early February 2013, a former police officer using a silencer on a 9mm Glock shot a young couple sitting in their car in what the Police Foundation called a “gang-style hit.” “Not a single neighbor had heard or seen a thing,” the Police Foundation wrote in its report about the beginning of a string of murders committed by Christopher Dorner in Southern California.
In “lightning bolt attacks” over the following 10 days, Dorner killed two police officers and wounded several others—including an officer who was shot nine times but survived—and drew a legion of cops into the mountains, where he eventually shot himself to death as they closed in.
So even Mother Jones admits that Dorner’s silencer use was a black swan event. And it’s hardly an iron-clad example; the wikipedia article on Dorner’s killing spree doesn’t mention silencers and [you and I and even members of the mainstream press know] that silencers don’t make guns silent.
But bloody shirt-waving is what the antis do, and Dorner’s all they’ve got. Here’s another example from usatoday.com:
Gun-control groups say the bill puts gun manufacturers’ profits over safety and would allow dangerous people to buy silencers, just by finding an unlicensed seller. They say crimes with suppressors are rare because the current law works, but the results are devastating when silencers are used. They say Christopher Dorner’s use of a suppressed firearm helped him avoid detection during a 10-day shooting spree in Los Angeles in 2013 that killed four people, including two police officers.
And here’s the LA Times’ version:
Others point to indications that silencers can reduce public awareness of developing firearm attacks and interfere with law enforcement. That appeared to happen in the 2013 Southern California murder rampage of former Los Angeles police Officer Christopher Dorner.
As The Times reported, Dorner’s early morning killing of a couple in a parked car in Irvine initially went undetected, even though he loosed 14 gunshots — apparently with a silenced weapon. Later in the rampage, when Dorner was cornered in the San Bernardino National Forest, his use of a silenced sniper rifle made it difficult for sheriff’s deputies under fire to pinpoint his position.
If Officer Dorner was still alive, he’d be delighted that gun control advocates are using his suppressed firearm(s) to argue against their de-regulation. Here’s the relevant excerpt from his manifesto:
In the end, I hope that you will realize that the small arms I utilize should not be accessed with the ease that I obtained them. Who in [their] right mind needs a fucking silencer!!! who needs a freaking SBR AR15? No one. No more Virginia Tech, Columbine HS, Wisconsin temple, Aurora theatre, Portland malls, Tucson rally, Newtown Sandy Hook. Whether by executive order or thru a bi-partisan congress an assault weapons ban needs to be reinstituted. Period!!!
It’s too bad hatred for Americans’ Second Amendment protections didn’t die with Officer Dorner. But it didn’t. So here we are, with silencer deregulation heading to the Senate. We’ll soon find out if Democrats respect the wishes of a murderous madman.
I would have thought his suicide would have shut him up more than it did.
I seem to remember that the DC Snipers caused a lot of trouble and fired from undetected locations without a muffler.
Instead they shot from inside a car.
Also, what’s with all the articles claiming silencers make crime “more devastating” or “more deadly”? It’s almost like these wordsmiths don’t understand English words.
Oh yeah? I didn’t not hear (heh) that they fired from a car. Makes perfect sense thought, now that I think about it.
The shooter laid down in the trunk of the car and fired through a hole cut in the trunk lid. That’s why nobody saw the DC snipers in the act.
Bottom of the page:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8351777.stm
BBC, SouthernPovertyBozos, MaJones,find a reputable source that does not hate America.
That’s it, I’ve had it: No silencers for cops. Only regular people.
At least he only used legally acquired weapons and silencers. Imagine if he had used an untraceable ghost gun AR47 assault rifle, an x- ray defeating, 3d printed Sig glock pistol, sawed off shotgun, black talon “cop killer” bullets, maybe an armor piercing fn five seven “desert eagle”, all with oil filter silencers? His victims would be so dangerously deader and permanently critically injured. Mark my words, we can’t allow people access to such fierce weapons of war.
does the ghost gun have the “shoulder thing that goes up”?
’cause ya gotta have that
No, it fires 30 caliber clips in half/sec though.
That should be “30 caliber magazine clip” so that is a clip that holds magazines, that’s 900 rounds in half a second.
His silencers were illegally acquired. He used a trust in a different state and lied on government documents. I think he got the rifles illegally using a police NFA number or something too. But that’s not important, look at the scary man with guns!
What a SJW minefield this is! On one hand, GUNS! On the other hand, COP! But he’s BLACK! Is he an oppressor because of GUNS and COP? Or is he the oppressed because of BLACK and COP? And two of his victims are Asian- WTF do we do with that?
I’m so confused about how I *should* feel.
What if he was a “closet homo”??? Maybe he self identified as an asian womyn. Then he’s not racist, just a victim, like every non-white sisgen straight man. I think that’s what they’re labeling OFWGs these days.
Thank god that he didn’t have a Glock 7.
Dornier is correct: dangerous violent mental nutbags, such as himself, should not have access to firearms.
They should be locked up in mental institutions.
But affirmative action quote baby trumps nutter.
In the news this morning was the story of a robbery in the parking lot of the local truck stop, which was connected to a homicide a few miles and a few hours later. The deceased was shot through the neck with a handgun–and none of the neighbors heard anything.
Boy, Dorner had a long list of things he wanted banned. How about we just ban mentally ill, rogue, black police officers under the spell of American hating Liberal Terrorist™ ideologies? Seems easier to protect freedom and liberty that way.
In many, spree shootings, survivors report misinterpreting the first sounds of gunfire as being construction machinery, something dropped, a car backfiring, etc. (What cars still backfire, anyway? Everything is fuel injected, nowadays. So you shouldn’t have stray fuel wandering into the hot exhaust and igniting, but I digress.)
The point is that even without suppressors, people’s reaction to the sound of gunfire is slow. Really, one could use a nice little .22lr rifle, from a modest distance, and nobody would ever distinguish it from the city din. It’s the sight of blood and bodies that prompts the screams that mobilizes people. That won’t change with slightly suppressed firearms, which virtually nobody would utilize anyway.
The proof? Though I’ve never made one myself, I do know a thing or two about machining and manufacturing. I call tell from the numerous how-to websites providing instructions that making a rudimentary “silencer” wouldn’t be that difficult.
Yet, their use in spree shootings or even everyday gangland slayings is, well, unheard of. Curious, that.
Subsonics or 22 shorts are hushed down and in the right barrel are quite quiet.<———-see what I did there?
Pity the estate of Hiram Percy Maxim , isn’t receiving residuals from all the use ( and misuse ) of perhaps the most enduring example of ” Branding” , (The Maxim Silencer), of a manufactured product ! Everyone knows abut his adaptation to firearms, but few about its use for steam escape pipes, air exhausts, and internal combustion engine exhausts.
Hell, in Chicago there can be a running gun battle with unsuppressed 12-gauges lasting 10 minutes, and none of the neighbors will have seen or heard anything.
Yeah…right…
Every source cited that same tidbit but exactly none of them asked the locals in the area how the got those bruises on their arms:
“Oh, that’s from when I hit the deck and hid…”
“They say Christopher Dorner’s use of a suppressed firearm helped him avoid detection during”
They? Who is “they”?
“Gun-control groups say the bill
Oh. Okay, sure. Glad to see you’re quoting reputable sources with no agenda or impetus to be lying sacks of shit.
It wouldnt matter if every single murder was made with a silencer-equipped firearm. It still wouldn’t be a case for their being an NFA item. The firearm is not more or less deadly as a result of a silencer’s use.
This is why I wish the gun-crowd would quit standing on this as point of argument, because what happens when and if the circumstances change?
From all the hedging, they don’t even know that he used a silencer. “They say” he did.” It “appears” he did, and “it appears” the use of a silencer may have prevented people from hearing and identifying the shots.
On that evidence we should definitely violate everyone’s rights.
So, the anti’s are agreeing with a manifesto-slinger who offed a bunch of people before offing himself?
Arguing from authority, I see.
We all know that the left will require suppresors as soon as they are legal. You won’t be able to carry without one
Is it possible Dorner was able to evade the police for so long because he himself was a cop, and therefore, intimately familiar with their techniques and tactics? Naw, it was the suppressor.
Stupid liberals should be bleached out of our gene pool or rounded up put in padded rooms and call them zoos where peeps can go view n what a nut house looks like….
Criminals don’t obey laws and anyone with .0000001 of a brain cell can suppress a gun in so many ways its utterly ridiculous….even for stupid keyboard commandos…..
Let me throw out two names, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. Can anyone say the Beltway sniper? The attacks of October 2002 killed 17 people and was never discovered while in the act of shooting. They committed these 17 murders over three weeks and never once used an evil suppressor. Evil is just evil and that will never change.
They seem to totally ignore the fact that in most shootings everyone turns into Helen Keller once they realize someone has been shot. Nobody sees anything nobody hears anything. Hell even when they do hear the first few shots they swear up and down it’s something other than gunfire and it isn’t until someone else screams gun and starts running that everyone else starts to move their asses out of the kill zone.
The anti-gun Left never mentions that silencers were ‘regulated’ to make it harder to poach wild game during the Great Depression (because apparently feeding the hungry was a crime during FDR’s New Deal).