HuntingRifle4

The Silencer Shop (www.silencershop.com) has been a major online player in the silencer business for several years, and just opened a brand new storefront in Austin, Texas that focuses on, strangely enough, silencers. Cans are big business here in Texas. It’s now legal to hunt anything you want with them here and where most shooting is done on private ranches where disturbing the neighbors is something you try to avoid. Naturally, the Silencer Shop is wary of the impending rule changes that the ATF is proposing that would grant the local sheriff the ability to deny all citizens in their jurisdiction the ability to purchase a device that would otherwise be perfectly legal. So they too have submitted a comment and it’s one of epic proportions. I suggest you read the whole thing, but here’s the money shot . . .

“The NFA’s CLEO requirement must be put in perspective. While a federal application to operate a nuclear reactor is blindingly voluminous, covering topics ranging from reactor security to environmental impact, the 10,000-plus-page application does not require a single CLEO certification. The federal application to handle, distribute, or manufacture substances such as cocaine, heroin, and MDMA under the Controlled Substances Act requires no CLEO certification. The USDA license to breed, own, and exhibit dangerous wild animals such as lions and tigers likewise contains no CLEO certification requirement. While some believe it is an oversimplification to state that “guns don’t kill people,” nuclear meltdowns, cocaine, and wild tigers clearly do kill people. Criminal history and mental stability are undeniably-relevant factors for consideration of applications to participate in such dangerous and highly-regulated activities. Yet, the responsible agencies have been able to analyze and regulate such applications—even within the all-encompassing context of a 10,000-page application to operate a nuclear reactor—without resorting to certifications from local or state chief law enforcement officials.”

Yeah, that pretty much sums up how dumb the ATF’s CLEO sign-off requirement is here in the real world.

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99 COMMENTS

    • I honestly don’t give a crap if MGs get dropped from NFA. I mean it would be cool but I’ve never really jonesed for a FA switch.

      SBR/SBS sold over the counter just like any other gun? Suppressors on the accessory shelves with no additional paperwork?

      TAKE MY MONEY

      • Machine guns do not have barrel length nonsense. You also don’t have to worry about the BS “readily converted in under eight hours” for those of us who like to tinker.

        • OK, I confess – I’m somewhat of a noob when it comes to gun tech, but once some guys in the shop were talking about guns, and one guy mentioned that you could turn a .45 (I’m guessing he meant a 1911 – this was in about 1970) into full auto by “filing down the sear.” He claimed he’d seen it done and it would fire a whole magazine (8 rounds?) in less than a second, like, “BRRRAP!”. Is that even plausible?

    • You’re delusional if you think that our current courts would go there… Heller was 5-4 and watered down enough.

      • Heller was 5-4 on the Washington D.C. gun ban but 8-1 on the individual right seperate of militia service.

        Not to mention that the anti gun nuts in Europe actually require their gun owners to own and use suppressors for target practice and hunting, geez, gues our anti gun nuts arent as evolved!

          • I’d like to see a citation, too. Here’s the decision: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf

            From page 3 of the opinion (page 6 of the overall document):

            The two sides in this case have set out very different interpretations of the Amendment. Petitioners and to­day’s dissenting Justices believe that it protects only the right to possess and carry a firearm in connection with militia service.

            From page 16 of Stevens’ dissent, joined by Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer (page 83 of the overall document):

            When each word in the text is given full effect, the Amendment is most naturally read to secure to the people a right to use and possess arms in conjunction with service in a well-regulated militia.

            Those two citations, taken together, make it seem to me that the court was divided 5-4 on the subject of individual right being separate from militia service.

    • The best way come the revolution to take out the cops is in ambush situations and pick them off one at a time.

      • If it comes to that we will not be dealing with local cops. It will be DHS types with far better equipment and more training. At that point IEDs would be more useful.

      • Yep these comments help us tremendously. Thanks for contributing to the stereotype that gun owners are anti-government nut jobs.

        • Chris is right. Those entitled mother’s who wish to disarm us would love to screenshot this and use it against us to prove gun owners are paranoid

        • We could just speak through quotes from long dead OWGs and it would say far more shocking things. Would you prefer that? I can get the quote machine cranking…

        • Sure, John, why not? Go for it. Go full retard. Just remember when they start to paint all gun owners with that wide brush, you gave them the ammo.

        • @Chris75: Hmm… retard or paranoid coward… nice false choice there bud. Are you stating that we should NOT post quotes from the founders of this nation?!?! What other people decide to think or do is on them. I’m free and intend to remain so; not unlike many of the gentlemen and ladies who read and post here at TTAG. Please, consider meditation or focused breathing, okay?

        • God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. –Thomas Jefferson

        • It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men. –Samuel Adams

        • The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men. –Samuel Adams

        • If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. –Samuel Adams

        • John don’t forget the ‘Tree of Liberty” one. There will be no glorious revolution that so many of these posters seem to want. If you start killing cops, then they will just label you a domestic terrorist group that has declared war. Then Posse Comitatus goes out the window and you have Apaches, drones, and tanks to contend with. The kind of revolution we need is through the ballot box.

        • @Chris75: It’s already six comments upstream. 😉

          If you start killing cops,

          You’re reading more into people’s comments than is actually there. People are commenting that *if* such action is needed then such-and such would be true or wise in that situation. You started off acting concerned about what other people would think but your last comment shows that it’s really your panties in a wad over the comments.

        • Thanks for contributing to the stereotype that gun owners are anti-government nut jobs.

          Thanks for contributing to politician’s stereotype that some gun owners are wishy-washy cowards. It helps tyrants sleep better at night thinking that they are raping sheep by day and not real men. 😀

      • Cops are not the problem. Better to pay personal visits to the responsible politicians. “… When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Not my words.

        • Sure, let’s silence those with which we may disagree. I thought that was the tactic of the left, anti-freedom crowd. I thought those that stand for freedom are open to all thought? It is interesting that Chris also has to call names, “nut jobs”, “parnoid,” etc. Name calling is also a tactic of the left when facts don’t support their position. I’m starting to understand where Chris stands on freedom.

        • @theaton: I don’t completely stand behind what BLAMMO wrote but my take on it was the idea of holding those political leaders who violate the Constitution accountable. I didn’t take his comment to mean that they should be silenced for their words but that they should be accountable for their actions and have cause to be wary of violating the Constitution while in office. At least, that’s my $0.02 worth of analysis… if that.

        • @theaton: We’re good. I’m primarily in agreement with you and was using your post to offer some possible clarification more for others that might be lurking.

      • A-rod. I’m starting to think some of you nitwits making these kinds of comments are trolls planted here by the anti-gunners. What you say is not funny. Its just stupid. Grow up or go away.

        • No, it doesn’t. Like Chris75, you’re reading more into the comment than is actually written. IMHO, your concern is more an indication of projection than of fact.

        • Does using the word projection make you feel smart? No one is projecting. Some of us who actually have social skills know that talking about killing cops and politicians is a good way to scare the fence sitters who will vote to take our guns because they saw comments like this.

          • For the record, my opinion is that if it’s one comment, and you just let it go by with either silence or a single derisive response, that’d be the end of it, and the impact would be mimimal at best.

            But instead you keep arguing about it, drawing attention to it, and turning it into something much bigger than it started out. It’s called the Streisand effect.

        • Chris, you assume we CARE about fence sitters. I don’t recognize anybody’s power to infringe on my rights. They can have all the votes they want. “shall not be infringed.”

        • Infringement is exactly what we’ve had over the years starting in 1934. Just a little each time and eventually it’s all gone. Crazy revolution talk will only give them more to scare the uninformed voters.

        • So not in favor of the First Amendment either are you?

          Feel free to counter any comment with one of your own but calling for deletion is chickenshit.

        • @Chris75: Does using the word projection make you feel smart?

          I have the formal training and have held the requisite qualifications to use the term correctly. ‘Making me feel smart’ has nothing to do with it. Seek calm in your life, man, and stop worrying so much about what other people think.

        • @Chris75: Crazy revolution talk will only give them more to scare the uninformed voters.

          Well, it appears to scare you. That much we know from current evidence.

        • So Chris’ argument here is that our rights have been infirnged since 1934 and the infringement will continue until the right is gone. His solution is to infringe the right of free speech so as not to give those infirnging the RKBA amuntion to infinge the RKBA. His main argument style is ad hominem attacks, “does it make you feel smarter,” and name calling. Did I miss anything?

        • Look guys, this has devolved way too far. If we keep going sooner or later someone will compare me to Hitler. I know how this works. I only hope that I am wrong about how these comments will be judge when found by the antis and posted all over the internet. I really do. Now I know, why do we care what the antis think? We care because we need as many people in our camp as possible. Right now there are lots of people thinking about getting into guns for whatever reason. Maybe they are reading TTAG and trying to see if it’s for them. Then BANG! VIVA LA REVOLUCION!! all in their face. Then they decide that they want no part of that. They go buy a PS4 instead of an AR-15. One less shooter, one less NRA or GOA member. We need all the help we can get. Our shooting/gun owning culture is under attack. We need to grow it not alienate the moderates.

          • Sorry, Chris75, but I don’t self-censor based on what other people might think. And I’ve been refraining from commenting on your pissfest, primarily because having reached Master level, I no longer get my jollies trollbaiting.
            </thinly veiled sarcasm & attempted wit, note “master [troll] baiter” gag.>

    • come said revolution, many will be making workable silencers in their garages, basements, and yes, workshops. It’s not a difficult technology to work with, not at all. Steel wool, window screen, lithium grease, a tube of some sort, freeze caps, perhaps some jb weld, you’ll be well on your way.

        • Fuel filters work better, then the cleaning fluid can run out the other side through a hose and into a container for storage and reuse, or proper hazmat disposal. Plus the elements are replaceable once there’s too much build up from cleaning your barrel.

    • During the revolution, who needs a stamp when you can get an filter adapter for less than $20?

  3. no one in the us has ever died from a nuclear meltdown as non have ever occurred in our country
    FYI three mile island was not a meltdown. otherwise a good comment the ATF is as a whole a stain on the second amendment

    • Fukushima and Chernobyl would beg to differ, a nuclear meltdown harms the whole globe, not just the neighborhood it happens in. I have relatives that lived in the SW during the 40’s and 50’s who have died to various cancers linked to being downwind from the NM testing sites. Radiation kills, just not as quickly usually.

    • Three Mile Island was a meltdown. As was Fermi 1, as chronicled in The Day We Almost Lost Detroit. I believe there have been a few others.

      Meltdown does not necessarily mean catastrophic cloud of nuclear death. In Chernobyl’s case it was a string of explosions caused by the meltdown that caused the problem. Well that, and general lack of infrastructure to actually keep a reactors maintained, but hey….

      • Of the handful of reactor meltdowns that have occurred to US designed electrical power reactors over the last 45 years, I don’t know of any that caused a fatality. There was no contamination release from many of them and the ones that did release contamination, it was in the form of short lived gasses that were at levels significantly below what it takes to harm a person. I guess that is why even after Fukushima the nuclear industry has one of the best if not the best safety records of all industries in the US. Oh and Chernobyl is just an example of why you should never let a Marxist regime design and operate a nuclear reactor.

        • Agreed. Also, speaking generally, as far as I know each and every meltdown in the U.S. was caused primarily by the operators ignoring/misinterpreting the warnings issued by the control systems and then doing the wrong things to correct.

          And I don’t know if we can really classify Fukushima as a meltdown in the “OMG IT BLEW UP!” sense. I mean, technically the reactor did melt down, but after a 200 foot wall of water slammed into it. I’m willing to give them a bye on that one.

        • More people have been killed riding in Teddy Kennedy’s car than by peaceful use of nuclear energy.

    • SL-1 in Idaho, in 1961, was a meltdown and killed three operator/maintenance men. Fatalities were attributed to trauma, but they would have succumbed to radiation shortly following the incident. It was a small reactor, testing to power DEW line. 18 months to dismantle and bury it and all of the equipment used to remove it.
      Investigation resulted in required safety criteria to be met on all subsequent water moderated reactors.

  4. Sound Suppressors don’t silence anything. They just reduce the noise to the point where the shooter does not need hearing protection, but they are pretty loud.

    Sound suppressors should not be an ATF issue to begin with… but for that matter then ATF should be a convenience store, not a government agency.

    • True but if you are going to be facing marauding neighbors, occupying troops or the local sheriff I would think you would want every concealment advantage including suppressors and flash hiders. I don’t know maybe in practice it all goes out the window.

    • “Silencer” is how they are referred to in the law, I believe. So it’s kinda become a legal term. Certainly though, it’s still a legacy of legislators not understanding the subject matter they are legislating.

    • Hiram Percy Maxim (the son of Hiram Stevens Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim Machinegun) invented the SILENCER and he patented his invention as the Maxim SILENCER. Its completely correct to call a SILENCER a SILENCER, after all, that’s what its inventor called it. BTW, its also correct to call SILENCERS a muffler, moderator, or suppressor due to the functioning of SILENCERS. This silencer/suppressor terminology bullshit is perpetuated by people who have never even bothered looking up the origin of SILENCERS.

      • Thanks for saving me the typing. “Silencer” is also the term used in most, if not all, legislation regulating them.

      • Just a marketing ploy. Try it today and the Trading Standards Authority might have something to say. ‘Silencer Shop’ sounds like it sells auto parts (mufflers in US). I prefer ‘Supressor Store’ myself.

    • I think if a group of silencer manufacturers (Advanced Armament Corp., Gemtech, and Silencerco/SWR), one of whom actually has silencer in their name, decide to form a coalition for education and advocacy, and they decide to call it the American Silencer Association, I’m going to go ahead and agree with them.

      For what it’s worth, I used to be a pedant about “suppressor” as well, but I got over it. Now I use them interchangeably.

  5. I wish they (ATF) would take New Zealand’s approach, We (I was born there, I’m now a US citizen) have national healthcare (single payer) and one of the ways used to offset the cost to the tax payer for hearing aids etc. is to encourage the use of suppressors on all firearms. Suppressors are complete un-regulated, in fact the first firearm I owned was a Ruger 10/22 and it came threaded, $15 (NZD) at the time for a can, it was good for around 1000 rounds. As to all the other firearms regulations in NZ, they can keep them I’m an American 🙂

  6. This is Obama’s agenda — where he can’t get Congress to act, he’ll simply regulate with his agencies.

  7. By the way, the full comment is a long read, but it’s pretty impressive how they laid out all the problems with this proposed rule. Keep in mind that if someone points out an area where the proposed rule is in error as far as the financial and time impacts (and MANY have done so), the ATF has to answer those issues before it can proceed.

  8. That was an interesting comment thread. I just wanted to say owning a silencer/suppressor would be really cool. But, you know, Illinois and all.

  9. Kudos to the silencer shop and ttag for pointing out the absolute over reaching stupidity of the proposed CLEO requirements in the never ending attempted re-write of the NFA.

  10. @ Chris75

    “They” can vote to take my guns all they want.

    “They” can even repeal the 2nd Amendment.

    I will vote WITH MY GUNS and other skills against them.

    Cowards like you are one of the primary reasons our liberty is in the sad state it is today.

  11. Can’t help but point out that nobody has ever died from the meltdown of a Western nuclear reactor. It weakens their argument in my mind, even though I agree with the point they’re trying to make

  12. On page 31 et. seq the comment points out that the entire CLEO requirement (including the existing one on individuals) essentially violates the Printz decision, by attempting to dragoon state officials into helping enforce a federal regulation. If the state CLEO simply declines to process an application because he doesn’t have the resources, the comment maintain, then an entire class of firearms is effectively banned, placing the ATF in jeopardy of violating Heller.

    Gotta love it. The ATF is not only violating the 2nd Amendment as an ordinary human being would read it, they would be violating the 2nd and 10th amendments as established case law (which is what is legally binding) reads them.

  13. OFF TOPIC BUT I NEED MY FELLOW TTAG TO HELP ME OUT ON SOMETHING!! DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA ON THE BAN OF AOW IN CALIFORNIA?
    I REALLY NEED SOME INFORMATION ON THIS!

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