One of Maxim’s inventions, a muffler for the internal combustion gasoline engine, was lauded for its ability to reduce ear-splitting noise. Now mufflers are mandatory for cars, trucks, buses, and industrial machinery to keep people from suffering permanent hearing loss.

Maxim also invented a gun muffler. Popular among hunters and target shooters worldwide, even President Theodore Roosevelt was an avid supporter of the so-called Maxim Silencer. Silencers were in common use in the United States until the Great Depression, when impoverished Americans began using silenced rifles to poach deer, rabbit, and other animals — sometimes even livestock — to feed their families. This did not sit well with game wardens, ranchers or the federal government.

When Congress passed the National Firearms Act in 1934 to regulate machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and short-barreled rifles favored by Prohibition-era gangsters, silencers were thrown in for good measure. If a person wanted to buy a silencer, he had to seek approval from the federal government and then buy a punitively expensive tax stamp. (That’s still true today.) Gun mufflers have largely been associated with crime ever since, thanks to the Hollywood cliche of an assassin ominously screwing a silencer onto the barrel of a gun before a fight he almost always loses.

In the movies and on television, silencers reduce the sound of gunfire from a loud and distinct bark to a faint cough that can’t even be heard from the next room. In the real world, the three sounds created when a gun fires — the supersonic crack of the bullet, the muzzle blast of gasses created by burning gunpowder, and the cycling of the weapon — simply cannot be completely eliminated.

 

…There are now more than 800,000 silencers in the hands of citizens who are refining and defining their role in American society.

We now know that silencers make precision rifles more accurate, shotguns easier to swing on a consistent arc after clay pigeons and training guns much less intimidating for new shooters.

And at last there is a strong national push to remove silencers from the National Firearms Act via the Hearing Protection Act in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill has 50 co-sponsors, and would remove the $200 tax and six to nine month delays that typically accompany suppressor approval from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Under the revised law, anyone wishing to buy a silencer to protect their hearing would still be required to fill out an ATF form at their gun dealer, and would still undergo a background check.

Second Amendment restrictionists often say they want “common sense gun safety” measures, but more often than not their proposals are neither common sensical, nor about safety. Making silencers readily available to protect hearing, on the other hand, is a supremely logical way to defend shooters and bystanders from harm.