Paul Ryan takes questions about the Senate health care bill during his weekly press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., July 13, 2017. (Photo: Reuters)
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said at a press conference on Tuesday that the bill to ease burdensome regulations on suppressors “is not scheduled right now.”
“I don’t know when it will be scheduled,” Speaker Ryan said, though he added that “no one person gets to defined who we are a country.”
House Republicans held the presser to urge Americans to unify as a country after 64 year-old Stephen Paddock fired down on a country music concert from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, killing 59 and wounding more than 400.
Country music star Jason Aldean was performing his last song at the Route 91 Harvest Festival when the gunfire erupted.
But before the police had even finished moving the bodies, Democrats began calling for stricter gun control laws that don’t appear to have been able to prevent the tragedy. In fact, Hillary Clinton was quick to pounce on the National Rifle Association (NRA), which backed the bill, though she demonstrated an embarrassing lack of knowledge of the issue in a tweet.
The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots.
Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 2, 2017
Jimmy Kimmel also made several statements that were either misleading or flat-out false in an effort to shame lawmakers into enacting gun control laws. He, too, said Congress is now working to “legalize the sale of silencers.”
In truth, they are not called “silencers” but rather suppressors, and they have been legal in 42 states for a long time. They are widely owned and used by hunters and sport shooters for hearing protection, but they do not silence the weapon very much, at all. The bill Speaker Ryan just tabled removes the federal tax on suppressors, as well as the burdensome process in place to obtain them.
As far as Mrs. Clinton’s comments, suppressors cannot be used on fully automatic weapons, which are also illegal for most citizens to purchase. They melt down and they do not suppress the fire enough for crowds of people to be any less aware of an active shooter.
According to a study by Paul A. Clark in the Western Criminology Review, there were only two federal murder cases using a suppressor during a ten year period of time from 1995 to 2005, In both cases, the perpetrator used a handgun and, in one case, the suppressors were homemade. Mr. Clark concluded that the illegal use of suppressors to commit murder is “unlikely to have any effect on crime”.
