It was just a couple days ago that I was talking about how the Washington Post’s own internal Fact Checker blog debunked the “silencers are ineffective and dangerous” claim made by gun control groups and the Washington Post’s own editorial board. Now it seems that the New York Times is jumping on board the “silencers help bad guys” train with their latest anti-silencer editorial using the exact same logic that the Washington Post just finished debunking.
From the Times:
The annual tally of 30,000-plus gun deaths accounts for just a tiny fraction of the total shots fired, most of which miss their targets but terrorize neighborhoods. Amid the lethal cacophony, the police in more than 90 cities here and abroad seek to reach the scene of the latest gun troubles more quickly by using an audio detection system called ShotSpotter, which triangulates the sound of gunfire onto computer maps. Police officers in major cities hail these precise early alarms of where the latest shooting is.
In short, their protestation is that silencer would make it harder for police and others to spot mass shooters and track them down. The Washington Post did a fantastic job of showing just how ill informed about firearms technology and the realities of physics someone would need to be in order for that to make sense, but I think the Chief Executive of ShotSpotter (the technology specifically cited as the panacea for gun violence in the article which would be thwarted by silencers) put it in a far more succinct manner:
“In regard to gun silencers, it is more accurate to call them suppressors, as they suppress the impulsive sound of gunfire, not wholly eliminate it,” said Ralph Clark, the chief executive of ShotSpotter. “We have successfully if not inadvertently detected confirmed suppressed gunfire within our existing deployments.
Although we have not formally tested the theoretical impact to our system, we intend to do some targeted testing in the near future. We believe we will have various options ranging from increasing our sensor array density to developing software/firmware to address the detection of suppressed gunfire if it were to become a widespread issue.”
The New York Times is once again wrong on the facts about firearms, silencers, and the impact of potential legislation on “gun violence.” They are disseminating the very definition of “fake news” that they claim to despise, yet have no issue with that because it advances their own agenda.