No plans to bring gun silencer bill to House floor, Ryan says

By Mike DeBonis / The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., said Tuesday that Republican leaders had no plans to advance a bill that would make it easier for Americans to purchase gun silencers.

The focus on the silencer legislation, which passed a House committee last month, was magnified Monday after the Sunday night shooting in Las Vegas that left at least 59 dead and hundreds injured.

“That bill is not scheduled now; I don’t know when it’s going to be scheduled,” Ryan said. “Right now we’re focused on passing our budget.”

The Las Vegas shooting is the latest incident of mass violence to put Republican lawmakers on the defensive over their opposition to new gun restrictions — and, in some cases, their efforts to eliminate existing ones.

The Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act passed the House Natural Resources Committee on a party-line vote last month. Currently, owning a firearm silencer requires a special license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives similar to the regulations surrounding machine guns and explosives. The House bill would instead treat silencers, also known as suppressors, like a firearm — requiring only a federal background check.

The legislation also includes provisions that would loosen restrictions on transporting firearms across state lines and prevent certain types of ammunition from being designated as “armor-piercing” and thus subject to tighter federal oversight.

Opponents of the measure say that the silencer provision, in particular, could make it harder to identify a shooter during an incident such as the one in Las Vegas.

But Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., the bill’s sponsor, said in an interview Monday that the silencer provision would have had little bearing on the events in Nevada — pointing to media reports that the shooter may have had more than a dozen firearms, some of which may have been illegal.

“He’s already breaking the law shooting an automatic weapon that wasn’t registered, so what’s going to stop him, had he chosen to shoot a suppressed weapon, to do that?” Duncan said. “The thing is, and the thing he probably realized is, it doesn’t make any difference — it’s still loud.”

At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, there was discussion of what happened Sunday in Las Vegas but, according to several members, there was little talk of a legislative response.

“We all discussed the tragedy and certainly all of our thoughts and prayers go out to them, and that was pretty much the total extent of it,” said Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y.

Collins added that Congress ought to focus on mental health rather than gun restrictions: “We are not going to knee-jerk react to every situation. The Democrats continue to want to say, when a mentally deranged person does what they do, it’s the gun’s fault, not the shooter’s fault … People focused on mayhem and the kind of evil this person was — in their heart, you can’t stop them. They will do it one way or the other. You can’t stop a mentally deranged person.”

Law enforcement officials have not given any indication to date that the shooter, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, has ever been treated for mental illness or showed any signs of instability.

Ryan also told reporters that the focus ought to be on mental health rather than gun restrictions. Congress passed an overhaul of mental health laws last year, but that legislation did not include some firearm restrictions that gun-control advocates had pushed for.

“One of the things we’ve learned from these shootings is that often, underneath this, there is a diagnosis of mental illness,” Ryan said. ” … Mental health reform is a critical ingredient to making sure that we can try to prevent some of these things from happening.”

Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., who represents the northern part of the state, said it was a “humbling time” for Nevadans but did not mention the need for any specific legislative response.

“There’s time in the coming weeks to find those answers and do those sorts of things that we need to do and see what the lessons are learned,” he said. “But I think right now, it’s just that humility — thoughts and prayers to those folks that were affected, both those that are here and those that are gone.”