They say that a suppressor cost $5 in 1934, that may sound like chump change and at first glance it sounds like every kid would have one on their squirrel gun but $5 back then is equivalent to a little over $91 today - how many people had that kind of buying power during the depression - not very many. People poached back then because they were poor and poor people could barely find the money to buy a handful of .22 caliber cartridges every month to two for hunting squirrels, they sure as heck couldn't afford to spend that kind of money on a suppressor.
They wouldn't be buying them from Hiram Maxim, if that's what you're getting at. Rudimentary silencers are incredibly simple, granted a little harder back then since there were no plastic bottles or duct tape, but crude pipe/tube cans were around. Maxim wasn't the only inventor, and not the first person to recognize a car muffler and silencer were doing the same things. Suffice to say family oral history is my 'source' on this one. The 'cost' argument is kind of like saying thieves would never pay for name brand name lock picks; they don't, and yet they sometimes use them and there are laws against "burglar's tools" as an add-on charge.
I'll have to do some more formal research with local wildlife management folks at some point; there's very, very little detailed info about poaching at all in easily accessible areas from what I've found, which makes simple sourced retorts harder. The focus is hugely overseas regarding endangered animals, and hugely directed toward international audiences without such a fascination with silencers. It seems like a very obscure facet of an already obscure issue, that is not formally tracked; it also sounds like it is extremely common for silencers to be simply confiscated & not prosecuted (mentioned in at least three anecdotes of about six I could find). The few prosecutions I found also involved more serious infractions like drugs, violence, or machine guns. It's painfully obvious that the only poachers getting caught are the ones not using silencers --or maybe they just plead guilty so the charge is dropped to avoid the paperwork. You know, I hear no one ever lies on the form 4473 either, since hardly anyone gets prosecuted for doing so, and Chicago has a strangely low rate of convicted criminal possession despite all the arrests involving felons with guns
capnmac said:
That was the stated opinion of the intelligentsia of the day, with some concurrent blather by Dept of Interior folks looking for funding increases, but, no one can actually show that any such poaching actually occured. Certainly not in the quantity requiring federal regulation.
Well the same surely goes for machineguns as well, right? The few famous documented uses were almost all with stolen guns; more an argument for disarming the National Guard and police armories than the citizen, to be honest. And yet gangland shootings were clearly the motivation of the NFA machine gun prohibitions (it's a joke to call that tax anything but).
clickclickdo'h said:
I'm fairly confident that "crazy things that happen in Africa" has never been a good foundation for law in the US.
You've never built your own Form 1 silencer before, have you? It is a laughably easy, and cheap process. Even easier than an open bolt burp gun (which I
haven't dabbled in). There is plenty of documented evidence from lawful hunters that cans make hunting not only more enjoyable, but easier and more discreet. That wouldn't interest a poacher, would it, same as night vision or other niceties we enjoy in this country. I'm not arguing the anti-gun line that "there be no lawful use for these dastardly tools of villains" but that
obviously they will show up with criminals more often as they proliferate & normalize, so we had better not be hanging our hats on the notion they will remain as obscure as ever in this country. I submit the
only crime they have any practical use --and a fairly substantial use-- is in poaching. Just because snares/traps are the primary tools since the crooks is even less exposed to authorities doesn't mean things like silencers aren't also appealing.