Quote:The US gun industry is trying to shake off the Hollywood hitman image of the gun silencer and rebrand it as a hearing-protection device in a campaign to roll back regulations that date to the 1930s.

Quote:Now, a bill known as the Hearing Protection Act that is quietly making its way through Congress proposes to remove silencers from the list of regulated items under the National Firearms Act of 1934. The bill—co-sponsored by Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who narrowly missed getting shot in June when a gunman attacked a congressional baseball practice—would make the purchase of a silencer subject only to an instant background check, or potentially to no regulation at all in states that don’t require background checks for gun sales in private, at gun shows and online.“There are 300 million firearms out there and [about] 1 million silencers,” a gun industry executive said in June. “That shows you the relative scale of the business opportunity.”The new legislation “assaults the interests of our nation’s law enforcement officials and threatens our public safety and security,” David Chipman, a retired ATF special agent and senior policy adviser at Americans for Responsible Solutions, said at a recent congressional hearing. “When silencers are used in crime, the results are particularly deadly.”

Donald Trump Jr. has thrown his weight behind the bill: In a 38-minute interview with the CEO of one of the largest gun silencer manufacturers in the nation during his father’s presidential campaign, Trump Jr. argued that the regulation of silencers is just another example of “arbitrary policies by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”