Dana Milbank: NRA's 'Idea of Recreation' Includes 'Assault Guns' and 'Silencers'

Washington Post (WaPo) opinion writer Dana Milbank claims the NRA’s “idea of recreation” includes “assault guns,” “armor piercing bullets,” and “silencers.”

He writes ahead of a debate on the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act of 2017, which contains the Hearing Protection Act, and intimates that an NRA goal is to allow “quail hunting with an M777 howitzer or grouse hunting with an FIM-92 Stinger missile launcher.” His point is that hunting with such weaponry would actually demonstrate a need for using hearing protection devices.

Lost in Milbank’s hyperbole is the damage the sound of a 30.06 or 300 WSM gunshot does to the hearing and the medically proven superiority of suppressors over earmuffs or earplugs. For example, Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership have been emphatic about firearm suppressors fighting hearing loss. But Milbank appears to be too busy mocking suppressors to consider their advantages.

Writing in the WaPo, Milbank talks of “assault guns” and “armor piercing ammunition.” He suggests protections on “armor piercing ammunition” are “particularly timely because a growing percentage of Western grizzlies have been seen in recent years wearing Kevlar vests when they attack schools in Wyoming.”

In his bid to mock, Milbank misses the fact that body armor comes in various grades and that many common rifle rounds, including common hunting rounds, will piece certain grades of body armor with no problem. So giving the government power to classify one particular round as “armor piercing” over another is tantamount to giving bureaucrats the power to ban that particular round, whether it is, in fact, “armor piercing” by design.

This brings up the larger point: namely that gun control is mainly based on ignorance–that the people who have hedged in Americans with gun law upon gun law usually demonstrate little to no understanding of how guns work or why one firearm is a gun but another firearm is an “assault gun.”

The continued use of the moniker “silencer” to describe suppressors is another proof of this. It completely hides the fact that suppressors simply muffle the sound of a gunshot, making it manageable, rather than eliminating it altogether, as a “silencer” does in a Hollywood movie.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.