Free Gun Guys by Dan Baum

from the muzzle of the pistol, and the deep
thud
the shot made, moved me the way the first
slick-click
of Hank Hilliard’s Mossberg .22 rifle had. For years I saw silencers in every cylindrical object I found—toilet paper rolls, Magic Markers, apple corers—and affixed them to every toy gun I had. I know how that sounds, but to paraphrase Freud: Sometimes a silencer is just a silencer. When it was time to put away childish things, I tried making real ones by duct-taping two-liter soda bottles over the muzzle of a .22 pistol. They worked, sort of. A crude silencer is naught but a chamber in which exploding gases depressurize before escaping. In a commercial silencer, baffles—which look like a stack of washers separated by tiny spaces—tamp the sound even more. My homemade ones were nowhere near as cool as screw-on silencers. They made it impossible to aim and often flew off with the first shot. But they did give the gun more of a
snap
sound than a reverberating bang.
    They were also felonious. The first federal gun law, in 1934, required people who wanted a silencer to apply for a permit, submit to a background check, and pay a two-hundred-dollar federal tax—big money at a time when the average farmworker earned less than a dollar an hour. The same rules applied to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, which, when Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, and the Barrow Gang were tearing up the country, were the era’s weapons of mass destruction. Silencers got thrown into the law not because they were gangster weapons but because, in the depths of the Depression, people were using them to poach wildlife. For me to make a silencer without paying the tax was like applying to go to federal prison.
    By the time I was in the market for a real silencer, two hundred dollars and a bit of paperwork made applying for the permit little more onerous than applying for a passport. In the decade since 2000, the number of permit applications had grown sixfold. Silencers were becoming so popularthat the National Shooting Sports Foundation—the gun industry’s trade association—sent a flyer to its retailer members alerting them to this growth opportunity.
    When I told my friends I was in the process of getting a silencer, they were appalled. “You can buy silencers?” “Why does anybody need a silencer?” “An assassination weapon?” It turned out to be a very American attitude; in Europe, it was hard to get a license for a gun, but in most countries you could buy a silencer over the counter. In some, you were required to do so. Europe was crowded—who wanted to listen to gunfire?
    “We in Finland have no legislation which regulate or ban the use of silencers, not the hunting legislation, not the firearms legislation,” wrote Klaus Ekman, of Finland’s Hunters’ Central Organization. “But you have to remember that before you can buy a gun in Finland, you have to explain to the police the purpose you are buying the gun.”
    Peter Jackson, a designer and manufacturer of silencers in Scotland, sent me what amounted to a scholarly treatise on European silencer law, which included the remarkable news that silencers were completely unregulated in France; that silencers for shotguns and air rifles could be sold freely through the mail in the United Kingdom (I hadn’t known that shotgun silencers existed); that rifle silencers were available in Britain with minimal paperwork; and that Article 5 of Directive 2003/10/EC, a European Union law,
required
silencers to be issued to anyone, such as a gamekeeper, who used a gun at work. “Although this obligation only applies to the employers of people who are ‘at work,’ ” Jackson wrote, “it is a fair bet that our courts would award heavy damages against any official who denied a recreational hunter the protection against exposure to noise which is mandatory for a professional.” He also reminded me that silencers protect the sensitive ears of hunting dogs, who cannot