TL;DR; it’s likely a result of guns
Is it guns?
Edit: It’s guns.
I work with a few pro 2nd people and also a few ammosexuals. Guns in general, perhaps, but more so IMHO, it’s an unwillingness to use basic safety and protection. Idiots probably think tinnitus is manly.
I used to sell guns as part of my retail job, and because of the kind of store it was we got plenty of people from all over the political spectrum, and most of them I knew well enough know the majority had no moral qualms with firearms.
It was always a certain political view that were the ones most vocal about their gun ownership, and how earpro was for pussies.
Well I guess I’m soft and smooth, because I will happily use everything in my PPE arsenal to make sure everyone around me is as safe as possible at all times. As everyone should when firearms are involved.
Plugs, muffs, I like to use a rubber pad just because the impulse of the shots aren’t great for your joints and I’m getting to the age where my joints are starting to feel ways about stuff. Legally acquired sound suppression.
Shooting glasses that cover the sides too. I had a 22lr casing bounce off the range wall and hit me in the side of the eyelid because the glasses I had on didn’t wrap around the sides.
Safety is about more than the “basic rules of gun safety” that every person who touches a gun should know.
The fact that some people genuinely think that wearing something to keep themselves from going deaf makes them “weak” just makes me wonder how such people can figure out how to breathe and walk at the same time, let alone vote.
2x on the plugs and muffs. Depends on my glasses the muffs don’t get a perfect seal. And I swapped a limb saver buttstock on my skeet 1301 and my god did it make a difference in comfort.
To be fair, the most effective form of hearing protection is strictly regulated at the federal level.
Ear protection helps, but it is not completely effective. Earplugs and earmuffs together help, but too much of the noise reaches the cochlea via bone conduction. The only way to mitigate this is with what the law calls a “silencer” or “firearm muffler” and the gun community refers to as a “suppressor”.
Well next time you’re thinking “gun regulations are a failure and force me to risk my health for someone’s ideology”, just remember that’s exactly how every gun-control advocate feels (only they’re not worried about hearing loss, they’re worried about being maimed and murdered in property crimes and school shootings).
Really, any demands to legalize suppressors are asking the general public to give up just a little bit more safety so that gun owners can be even more insulated from the consequences of widespread gun ownership.
The deafening report from unmuffled firearms is a consequence of the prohibition from implementing a simple, technological solution. It is not a consequence of widespread gun ownership.
This report should be the basis of a lawsuit against the National Firearms Act. The government should be forced to weigh actual, tangible, measured harm from unsilenced guns against imagined, hypothetical forms of harm from quieter guns.
I’m told that Europe requires silencers.
The deafening report from unmuffled firearms is a consequence of the prohibition from implementing a simple, technological solution. It is not a consequence of widespread gun ownership.
Not what I claimed, just bits of my sentences glued together like a ransom note.
It’s also bullshit anyway. If Republicians are too insecure in their masculinity to use safety equipment this is widely available, the only reason they’d use supressors is because they make their hero fantasies look more like an action movie.
This report should be the basis of a lawsuit against the National Firearms Act. The government should be forced to weigh actual, tangible, measured harm from unsilenced guns against imagined, hypothetical forms of harm from quieter guns.
So the pro-gun community is going to hold the government to a standard they blatantly don’t hold themselves to? Sounds like a sleazy bit of manipulation to get suppressors and full-auto weapons to me.
I’m told that Europe requires silencers.
Which has outed you as someone who will believe any old bullshit if it gets them what they want, repeating it to others without 5 seconds of fact checking.
Republicians are too insecure in their masculinity to use safety equipment
You misunderstood or ignored my initial comment, so I will reiterate:
Ear protection only reduces sound passing through the ear canal. The noise from a gunshot is loud enough to cause damage to the cochlea by transmitting sound via bone conduction, through the skull and jaw bones, rendering ear protection largely ineffective.
The only effective form of hearing protection is by reducing the noise impulse of the firearm.
The rest of your comment is denigrating nonsense. People are being injured despite wearing hearing protection, and aren’t seeking effective forms of noise reduction due to red tape and the stigma that an individual using a suppressor is trying to live out a macho fantasy.
I wonder who I should believe? The gun owner who has already claimed “supressors are mandatory in Europe” or the guy with extensive qualifiications in the field of hearing loss that says the gun owner is full of shit.
The rest of your comment is denigrating nonsense
I accused you of demanding a standard from others that you don’t hold yourself (nor other gun owners) to and this is now the second time you’ve done exactly that.
I not only stand by that “denigrating nonsense”, I’m happy to escalate it: Take your propaganda and fuck off.
EU countries do not require silencers. On the other hand, AFAIK, the silencers themselves are not regulated in most/all EU countries. That makes them quite easy to get, and so many people that do recreational shooting or hunting choose to get them.
asking the general public to give up just a little bit more safety
You know that silencers aren’t magic, right? They don’t actually make guns silent? A gunshot will go from being about 150dB down to about 120dB, for most rifles and pistols. Any bullet that’s supersonic–and that’s most bullets–are still going to have a sharp ::crack:: from breaking the sound barrier. Additionally, silencers are pretty big, and will double the length of a pistol, while adding 6-12" to a rifle; that makes them a real challenge to conceal. Yes, you can make guns very, very quite relative to what a gunshot usually sounds like, but that’s about it; 120dB is still very loud, and is only hearing-safe for very, very short periods of time. To put that in context, a chainsaw running full-bore is about 120dB, and I’ve regretted every time I’ve used my chainsaw without ear protection.
Yep, I knew all of that but thanks for gunsplaining.
But if someone does claim “Mass shooters will use supressors and subsonic ammunition to obfuscate their position and intentions in order to kill more people”, what are the pro-gun community going to do? Claim “that’s never happened, there’s no genuine evidence it will be a common problems and you can’t sacrifice my safety just because a bad thing exists in your imagination”?
The pro-gun community routinely does exactly that. They claim we can’t have gun licenses because they can imagine them not being issued by a progressive government. They claim we have to keep selling guns to domestic abusers because they can imagine a spiteful ex-girlfriend getting someone’s poor innocent guns taken away.
And as long as they can imagine problems with gun control, we’re just going to have to keep getting maimed and murdered until we come up with a solution that they can’t imagine problems for.
So I’m going to show as much compassion for their eardrums as they have for victims of gun crime and say “fuck the lot of them, what we have suits me fine”.
If you don’t like that, come up with a solution I can’t imagine problems for.
Mass shooters will use supressors and subsonic ammunition
It’s ridiculously easy to make a silencer. “Solvent traps” have been sold as illegal silencers through Temu, Wish, Ali Express, and other sites (although it looks like they’ve finally taken them down, just live Facebook finally did for Glocks switches on marketplace); the risk, obviously, is that buying one is a federal crime if you get caught, which is honestly pretty unlikely (and for someone planning a mass murder, probably not even a concern). Despite this, there have not yet been any uses of silencers in mass murders. You can make a lightning link by bending a wire coat hanger that will make an AR-15 into a machine gun; the information is pretty freely available, and yet it’s not been used by mass-murderers yet.
To be quite frank, the tools have not changed all that much since the late 1970s, but we didn’t see very many mass-murder prior to Coumbine. Before the AWB in 1994, you could pretty easily go into any gun store and get an AR-15, AK-74 (or even a Steyr AUG if you had the money and wanted a bad rifle), but the mass-murder events that everyone seems so afraid of now simply didn’t happen with any real regularity. The issue then appears to be changing social conditions, rather than the tools themselves or the availability of the tools.
As a side note, I’m sure that eventually someone will say that reloading presses need to be banned, because it’s too easy to make untraceable subsonic .300 Blackout ammunition if someone has a press and load data.
They claim we can’t have gun licenses because they can imagine [emphasis added] them not being issued.
No, that’s actually happened. It happened in New York City; the city made it nearly impossible to get a license to even own a firearm, and made it an annual fee of several hundred dollars for each firearm that you owned. (It took several decades of lawsuits to get that changed, and the city is still trying to buck the SCOTUS ruling.) My license to own a firearm in Illinois was revoked because I was voluntarily held for observation at a hospital immediately after my–physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive–wife left me. You could see that with carry permits, before many states went to a ‘shall issue’ model from a ‘may issue’; e.g., only people that got carry permits in NYC were people that either bribed the police, or were politically connected. You can see it happening right now with items that are covered under the NFA of 1934; despite all of the background checks being electronic, it typically takes anywhere from 3 months to a year or more to get an approval and tax stamp for a typical person, but a week or so for a transfer between FFL holders.
They claim we have to keep selling guns to domestic abusers
If you have been convicted of any domestic violence crime, misdemeanor or felony, you are already legally, federally barred from owning a firearm. What you’re talking about is people who are the subject of restraining orders, which have a much, much lower standard of evidence; they are issued at the discretion of the judge, and may not involve any attorneys at all. In general, I’m opposed to revoking rights of any kind without a criminal proceeding.
If you don’t like that, come up with a solution I can’t imagine problems for.
Change the social conditions. Fix the problems that are leading to mass shootings in the first place. Tax the fuck out of the rich and corporations to pay for it. I’ll support that long before I’ll support anything that would curtail individual civil rights of any variety.
It’s ridiculously easy to make a silencer
Then why are you upset they’re banned? Just go and make one. I hear it’s ridiculously easy.
Fortunately, nobody outside of the pro-gun community is stupid enough to repeal a law just because its easy to break. Do you think “making a suppressor” is easier or harder than driving while intoxicated? What about smothering a baby? Should we get rid of those laws too?
Despite this, there have not yet been any uses of silencers in mass murders.
Doesn’t matter. The pro-gun community gets to make laws based on imaginary boogymen so it’s only fair that gun control advocates can too.
If you want to campaign for strictly evidence based gun laws, go right ahead, I’ll support you. You’re going to hate the results though.
You can make a lightning link by bending a wire coat hanger that will make an AR-15 into a machine gun; the information is pretty freely available, and yet it’s not been used by mass-murderers yet.
Yep, because mass murderers use whatever is most convient and thanks to people like you, that’s almost always a legally purchased, semi-automatic firearm.
To be quite frank, the tools have not changed all that much since the late 1970s, but we didn’t see very many mass-murder prior to Coumbine.
Then jump in your time machine and fuck off back to the 70s. The rest of us are stuck here in 2024 where mass murders are commonplace.
No, that’s actually happened. It happened in New York City; the city made it nearly impossible to get a license to even own a firearm, and made it an annual fee of several hundred dollars for each firearm that you owned.
Oh shit, you mean the problem was identified and solved without the pro-gun community shooting people?
My license to own a firearm in Illinois was revoked because I was voluntarily held for observation at a hospital immediately after my–physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive–wife left me.
Good. You were a suicide risk and removing firearms is literally the first thing you do as suicide prevention. It’s a super weird thing to get indignant about.
If you have been convicted of any domestic violence crime, misdemeanor or felony, you are already legally, federally barred from owning a firearm
Except for when they’re not. This also isn’t a policy that the pro-gun community supported, even though it still gave them ample time to execute their partners before they were convicted.
I’m opposed to revoking rights of any kind without a criminal proceeding.
How noble of you to sacrifice other people’s lives so that no gun owner is temporarily inconvenienced.
Change the social conditions. Fix the problems that are leading to mass shootings in the first place.
Off you go then. Better hurry, because there’s no way America will give you another 20 years of insisting you alone have the solution to a problem you still haven’t solved.
We’ve done this dance before remember? All you’re doing is admitting that under the conditions we have right now, the gun laws you’re defending are not fit for purpose.
No no no, it’s tone deaf
Kinda explains things when even mild hearing loss doubles your risk of dementia.
Not sure we can really say that one causes the other, though
I like guns, a lot. I own more guns than the typical gun owner. Given that I compete when I can–I have a match this weekend with a projected round count of 450, between rifle and pistol–I shoot more than about 99% of all gun owners.
I never shoot without ear protection. When I’m near people that are shooting rifles, I prefer to have both ear plugs and electronic ear muffs (because even with ear muffs, a gun shot is LOUD). Yeah, I’ve got hearing damage, but that’s because I was stupid and went to a shit ton of punk, industrial, and metal shows without hearing protection before I wised up in my 30s and started wearing ear protection to concerts. (I highly recommend Etymotic high-fidelity ear plugs; they reduce sound more evenly than foam earplugs, so you don’t end up having the earplugs kill all the treble and mid without touching the bass. The sound is much, much cleaner than with foam ear plugs.)
I will probably start buying silencers once I can, because they’re just too useful at preserving your hearing if you’re a high-volume shooter.
And, BTW - there’s no record of why silencers were put in the NFA of 1934. There apparently wasn’t any debate about it. We know that all handguns were originally going to be in the NFA, and short-barrel rifles and shotguns were included to prevent people from using that as a work-around for a handgun ban. But handguns were removed from the final version, which made SBRs and SBSs orphans in the bill. The best guess about silencers is that they were banned to make it a little easier for game wardens to detect poachers, since 1934 was the height of the Great Depression, and poaching was a common way for very poor people to feed themselves.
Are 3M earplugs not good? I know Etymotic is in audio, but 3M is in medical industry.
3M earplugs are fine for blocking noise in general. But all foam ear plugs block more noise at the treble and mid ranges better than in the bass. For live music, that means that the sound will end up being very muddy, with way too much drum and bass, and the vocals, lead, and rhythm guitar will be mostly gone. Etymotic is specifically good for audio settings; you’re getting less overall noise reduction, but it’s keeping the sound more clear.
I think that bass in particular is hard to block because at least some of the sound it through conduction rather than air movement in your ear canal.
Congress should’ve passed the Hearing Protection Act.
