On July 4th, President Donald Trump signed into law his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which included a provision that eliminated the tax stamp fee of $200, but did not deregulate suppressors under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA). The fee elimination will not take effect until January 1, 2026, and suppressors will still have to be registered under the NFA, with the standard government overreach of forms, fingerprinting and government approval. In the meantime, the NRA and other gun rights advocates have announced plans to file “a new strategic lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the NFA in Federal Court.”
Gun control groups like Everytown and Giffords, however, maintain that the “NFA has kept silencers out of criminal hands for over eighty years,” and that suppressors “are inherently dangerous devices” that “present a serious public safety concern” and “should not be widely available to civilians.” Suppressors, they allege, do not protect a shooter’s hearing, and the “real reason the gun lobby wants to deregulate silencers is so that the industry can profit off their sale.”
Such claims would lead one to expect that the United Kingdom, as rabidly weapon-adverse and anti-gun as Giffords and Everytown and their supporters could ever wish, would likewise maintain draconian legislative controls on these “inherently dangerous devices that criminals may use to suppress the sound of gunfire and mask muzzle flash.”
Yet, in fact, the opposite appears to be happening.
In 2024, the U.K. government published a public consultation paper seeking input regarding its proposal to remove “sound moderators” from firearm licensing laws. Sound moderators, a.k.a. suppressors or silencers, are controlled under section 57(1)(d) of the Firearms Act 1968, which (much like the U.S. Gun Control Act and NFA) defines “firearm” to include “an accessory to a lethal barrelled weapon or a prohibited weapon where the accessory is designed or adapted to diminish the noise or flash caused by firing the weapon.”
The consultation document explained the background. A firearms certificate, issued by the police, is necessary to acquire and possess a sound moderator, which incurs costs both for the individual applying for a certificate, and for registered firearms dealers in checking that a potential purchaser has the necessary authority to acquire the item. However, sound moderators are not firearms: these “are entirely inert objects and contain no moving parts and do not of themselves create a risk to public safety.” Existing legislative controls were motivated by “concerns about the use of these devices by poachers, enabling them to shoot game illegally by reducing the noise of their rifles. Such concerns have dissipated over time and are now considered to be outweighed by the health and safety benefits to professional rangers and others in the exercise of their legitimate, lawful functions.”
At the end of the consultation period – open to anyone who wished to participate – almost 20,000 responses had been received. Respondents were asked to self-identify as one of eight defined categories, including member of the public, shotgun/firearm certificate holder, firearm dealer, police/law enforcement body (those responding officially on behalf of a policing or law enforcement body, such as a police force), shooting body, a general “community/third sector/gun control” option (anyone responding on behalf of an entity that fell within this category), and “other.” “Member of the public” meant a person who did not fall into any of the specific categories listed.
All were asked to respond to the questions below, as well as provide any additional comments they felt were relevant:
Q1. To what extent do you agree or disagree that the requirement to obtain a certificate from the police in order to acquire and possess a sound moderator should be removed?
Q2. To what extent do you agree or disagree that there is no risk to public safety in removing sound moderators from licensing controls?
Q3. To what extent do you agree or disagree that the health and safety benefits of using sound moderators are important?
The Home Office released its “consultation outcome/government response” report last month, which included a breakdown of the responses. While the majority of the responses (85%) were from shotgun/firearms certificate holders, responses were also tracked within each separate category. That’s where things get interesting.
Significantly, the responses show not just exceptionally high levels of public support for deregulating sound moderators, but from official representatives of police/law enforcement bodies as well. Even the “community/third sector/gun control” group support never fell below 89% in favor for any of the three questions.
Overall, 94% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with Q1, that a firearm certificate should no longer be required to acquire and possess a sound moderator. Within the categories of “representative of police/law enforcement body” and “member of the public,” the agree/strongly agree responses came in at almost the same level of support (92% and 94%, respectively).
Q2, on the risk to the public posed by deregulation, had the highest level of overall support, with 98% of all respondents strongly agreeing/ agreeing that removing the licensing requirement posed no safety risk to the public. Here, too, the support from members of the public was almost identical (97%) to the overall support. The police/law enforcement body support dropped to 88%, which was just a hair below that of the respondents in the “community/third sector/gun control” category (89%), but both were, nonetheless, still overwhelmingly in favor.
Q3, on health and safety benefits of using sound moderators, also had high levels of overall and within-category support. Ninety-four percent of members of the public were in favor, as were 92% of law enforcement representatives; overall, 95% of all respondents had an agree/strongly agree response.
The government “carefully considered the responses” and comments. In some of these additional comments, respondents “drew attention to the savings in police time that would arise if they were no longer required to administer variations to firearms certificates each time a firearms certificate holder acquires a sound moderator or disposes of one.” Many respondents “questioned whether there was any evidence to show that sound moderators had ever featured in crimes involving firearms.” Others insisted that “whatever the arguments for or against the de-regulation of sound moderators, any relaxation of firearms controls should be resisted, and that there could remain some value in the police making checks” of certificate-holders.
Taking all of these viewpoints into account, the conclusion reached by the government was that there “are strong arguments in favour of removing sound moderators from firearms licensing controls. As set out in the consultation paper, these items are a firearms accessory that present no danger in themselves to the public.” Despite this finding and the overwhelming public consensus, the government still opted to couple deregulation with a recommendation that possession of sound moderators be limited to those in possession of a valid firearms certificate. The next step would be to make the necessary changes through legislation to remove “sound moderator” from the Firearms Act 1968, and “we will seek to make this change when Parliamentary time allows.”
Suppressors in this country are likewise “entirely inert objects” with no public safety justification for their federal taxation and regulation. There are millions of registered suppressors in America. Far from being the alleged “inherently dangerous devices that criminals may use,” a 2007 study by the Western Criminology Review notes that “[t]ens of thousands of Americans each year use silencers for perfectly harmless activities (such as target shooting) or even beneficial activities (such as shooting rats and rabid animals),” and that the “use of silenced firearms in crime is a rare occurrence.” The study author was able to locate only two cases, between 1995 and 2005, of a silencer being used in a murder in the United States.
Similarly, in 2017, Ronald Turk, the Associate Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) under the Obama administration, recommended removal of suppressors from the NFA, citing both the burden/costs of enforcement and the negligible role that suppressors played in crime: “silencers are very rarely used in criminal shootings,” making it “reasonable to conclude that they should not be viewed as a threat to public safety necessitating NFA classification.”
If suppressors are almost unanimously accepted as non-dangerous and having important health benefits in a place as unswervingly committed to restricting civilian firearm ownership as the United Kingdom, it is clearly high time for the United States to reconsider its treatment of suppressors and the fallacies underlying their outdated classification within the NFA, and deregulate suppressors entirely. Here at the NRA, we’ll continue the fight for the complete elimination of the NFA and analogous state-level bans and restrictions of suppressors.
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