Michael Bloomberg’s gun control network is sounding the alarm over suppressors. Again. Everytown for Gun Safety’s The Smoking Gun is attacking a Trump administration reform that will move certain commercial suppressors from State Department export controls to the Commerce Department.
NSSF fired back at Everytown’s attack, arguing the gun-control group is misrepresenting a reform that still leaves commercial suppressor exports subject to federal oversight. But the bigger story is why the government made the change at all.
The Government Just Undercut the Anti-Suppressor Narrative
Beginning November 20, export controls for certain suppressors designed for non-automatic and semiautomatic firearms will move from the U.S. Munitions List to the Commerce Control List.
The change doesn’t eliminate export controls. The Commerce Department says licensing requirements will remain in place while suppressors specially designed for fully automatic firearms will remain under State Department jurisdiction.
But the State Department’s justification for the reform is devastating to decades of anti-suppressor rhetoric. The Department concluded that ordinary commercial suppressors “no longer provide a critical military or intelligence advantage.”
Federal officials pointed to their growing civilian use, noise-reduction benefits, widespread foreign production, and increasing availability. Those findings appear directly in the State Department’s rule. In other words, even the federal government is acknowledging that ordinary suppressors are not some exotic piece of military-only hardware.
Bloomberg Still Wants Americans to Fear Suppressors
Everytown apparently didn’t get the memo. Its Smoking Gun agitprop project has branded suppressors “Quiet Killers” while attacking efforts to reduce federal restrictions.
That framing depends on keeping alive the Hollywood myth that suppressors make firearms silent or transform ordinary guns into assassins’ weapons.
They don’t. Texas Gun Rights President Chris McNutt has previously put the issue plainly:
Suppressors don’t silence anything. They simply reduce the deafening report of a firearm to a safer level. That’s not dangerous — it’s responsible.
That is why Texas Gun Rights has consistently pushed back against efforts to demonize suppressors. And recent court precedent makes the anti-suppressor narrative even harder to defend.
In June, the Fifth Circuit held that suppressors qualify as protected Second Amendment “Arms,” recognizing that they reduce noise, recoil, and muzzle blast while improving the effectiveness of a firearm for lawful purposes. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion explains those functional benefits directly.
The court didn’t invalidate the NFA’s suppressor restrictions, but its recognition that suppressors fall under the Second Amendment was an important step.
The Real Fight Is Getting Suppressors Out of the NFA
The Trump administration’s export reform is welcome. But moving commercial suppressors from one federal export control system to another isn’t the finish line. Suppressors remain regulated under the National Firearms Act and subject to federal registration.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg-funded gun control groups continue trying to convince Americans that a device designed to reduce dangerous firearm noise should be treated like sinister contraband. Now the government’s own findings are helping expose how hysterical and outdated that argument has become.
It’s time for Washington to stop treating suppressors like contraband and remove them from the NFA once and for all.
The latest National Firearms Survey is out – among that covered …a lot more AR’s out there than thought, 2.2 million DGU’s a year, some great numbers on firearms, Mark Smith discusses…
ht* tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBBUpZ-x_d0
2026 National Firearms Survey: Results from the Second Wave, Including Current Ownership of AR-15 Style Rifles, Other “Assault Weapons,” and Magazines that Hold More than 10 Rounds [ note: covers a lot more, including defensive gun use]
“Abstract
This report summarizes the findings of the second wave of the National Firearms Survey, a national survey of firearms ownership and use conducted in July and August of 2026. The survey was administered online to a representative sample of 51,398 U.S. residents aged 18 and over, and it identified 16,688 internally validated gun owners who answered in-depth questions concerning their ownership and use of firearms, including questions about using a firearm in self-defense. The second wave incorporates a series of methodological refinements that respond directly to scholarly discussion of the first (2021) wave: ownership questions specify individual rather than household or spousal ownership; questions about magazines and “assault weapons” ask about current rather than past ownership; AR-15 type rifles and other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles are asked about separately; respondents who report defensive gun uses are asked the approximate age at which each incident occurred and whether the defensive use succeeded in averting a crime (or was directed against an animal threat); and, as a two-stage data-integrity check, respondents are counted as gun owners only if they both indicated firearm ownership on a screening question and subsequently reported owning a positive number of rifles, shotguns, or handguns in a detailed count of firearm types that required a response. In addition, the analyzed sample reflects standard quality-control checks, including an embedded attention check and the removal of responses with low reCAPTCHA scores and suspected duplicate responses.
With raked weighting on gender, age, race, and state of residence, using targets from the 2024 American Community Survey, the survey finds that 32.7% of U.S. adults (95% CI 32.2% – 33.2%) personally own firearms, suggesting that approximately 88 million American adults own guns. Following the practice of major survey programs such as the General Social Survey, Gallup, and Pew’s American Trends Panel, household income is not employed as a weighting dimension. However, income-raked estimates, which range up to 34.9%, are reported as robustness exercises in an appendix. Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points. The survey finds that 37.6% of gun owners have used a firearm to defend themselves, their property, a family member, or a member of their household, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 2.2 million incidents per year. In most defensive incidents no shot was fired (76.3%), about half (50.8%) involved more than one assailant, and in 70.6% of incidents respondents report that the defensive use was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police. 8.4% of defensive incidents were directed against animal threats rather than criminal threats. Separate from these self-defense incidents, 34.7% of gun owners reported that the mere presence of a gun has deterred criminal conduct.
A majority of gun owners (70.0%) indicate that there are some circumstances in which they carry a handgun for self-defense. We estimate that approximately 33.6 million gun owners (39.3% of those aged 21 and over) are “public carriers” who are permitted to carry and carry at least sometimes. The average gun owner owns about 5.2 firearms, and handguns are the most common type of firearm owned (91.6% of owners). 50.5% of gun owners – approximately 44.5 million adults – report that they currently own magazines that hold more than 10 rounds (approximately 539 million such magazines in total), and 88.0% of these owners cite a defensive purpose for owning them. 25.0% of gun owners currently own an AR-15 type rifle, 12.9% currently own other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles, and 30.0% – approximately 26.4 million adults – currently own at least one firearm in one of these two categories, with approximately 40 million AR-15 type rifles and 20 million other similarly styled rifles owned in total. Overall, Americans own approximately 461 million firearms, consisting of approximately 208 million handguns, 154 million rifles, and 99 million shotguns.
…
[note: download the PDF from the link to read the whole thing]
ht* tps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7347338
If the “gun community” and the “gun industry” work together, if that’s possible. The deregulation of suppressors could cause the biggest flood of new gun owners to ever occur.
The noise and the recoil are very scary for people, who have never ever been aound guns before.
The “gun news media” has already covered the silencer advertisement of over 100 years ago. It focused on being polite to your neighbor’s by making your gun less noisy.
Concealed carry has become the major focus of the business. Now making guns quiter I hope, will become the next goal.
The question is will the europeans flood the market??? While the americans are trying to figure this out.
Just watch TFB TV. When they go to the european version of the SHOT Show. And show case all the suppressed guns.
“It’s time for Washington to stop treating suppressors like contraband and remove them from the NFA once and for all.”
Sounds like what needs to happen is to start crafting lawsuits specifically for that specific justice in the 5th circuit…