Silencers So Easy to Get in the UK that American Tourist Brings Some Home, Goes to Prison
billj 03.15.17
As restricted as firearms are in Great Britain, it’s massively easier to get suppressors there than it is over on this side of the pond. A case in point is one Paul Gratton of Tennesse, who will now serve ten years in prison for picking up a few suppressors in the UK and trying to bring them back into the US as souvenirs:
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A Murfreesboro man is being convicted by a federal jury for smuggling gun silencers into the United States that he purchased while traveling in England. Nashville prosecutors say 50-year-old Paul Gratton purchased six silencers from a firearms dealer in Sheffield.
Gratton shipped some of the firearm parts to the U.S, while he carried the other parts in a checked bag on his flight back to Tennessee. Authorities revealed that none of the silencers had serial numbers.
Yep, you read that right: they don’t even bother to put serial numbers on suppressors over there, because they’re dead-simple devices that any monkey with a drill can make.
The fact that suppressors are easy to make and should be entirely unregulated makes hasn’t stopped the ant-gunners from going all-out to fear-monger over the HPA. For instance, read Senator Kirstin Gilibrand’s recent statement on the HPA and gawk at the hysteria.
I’d wonder what folks like Gilibrand will say when the Hearing Protection Act passes and it has zero impact on crime or gun violence, but I already know the answer, because we’ve seen this movie before with concealed carry.
Concealed Carry laws were supposed to turn states into the Wild West, with shootouts in the streets and so on. Except they haven’t made any real difference in anything.
Campus Carry was supposed to turn our schools into shooting galleries, where free speech is chilled by the possible presence of guns. But it turns out that the only groups reliably suppressing free speech are campus lefties.
So when the HPA passes and it has literally no impact on anything anywhere, except the sales of ear protection go down because Americans can finally do what European shooters do and put simple baffle stacks on the end of their guns, the gun control folks will have moved on to scaremongering about something else.
