30 November—Continuing our dialogue, here’s El’s response to yesterday’s disquisition: “El Liberalissimo neither automatically trusts nor distrusts his government. We live in a shit-storm of information from which I select widely and draw whatever conclusions seem most reasonable and persuasive. I know there will always be politicians who seek to game the system for personal gain. In the spirit of fairness you must also accept that occasionally there might be a politician or two with scruples and the primary desire to do what’s right.”

El is absolutely right. There may indeed be a scrupulous pol or two whose primary desire is to do what’s right. But most seek to game the system for personal gain. Just like anybody else, when you think about it.

And that naturally takes us to suppression. Along with El’s, I received an email yesterday from an online firearms dealer with a tempting promo: a BOGO—buy one, get one—on suppressors. Most people call them silencers, as did the inventor, Hiram Percy Maxim, on his patent application at the turn of the twentieth century.

Hiram Percy Maxim invented his silencer while he was perfecting an automobile muffler, still known as a silencer outside of North America and Oz. A gun silencer suppresses the sound to a certain extent and reduces muzzle flash. Mufflers for internal combustion engines do much the same thing, including the reduction in minimal external combustion. (But morons with motorcycles punch holes in mufflers or do other things to disable their effectiveness and police do nothing to enforce the laws the bikers insist on breaking.)

Hiram Percy was fully American, having been born in Brooklyn (New York, not Connecticut) and educated at MIT. His father, Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, born in Maine, educated in the workplace, and a naturalized Brit who died in London, had invented the first automatic machine gun—coincidentally called the Maxim—in the 1880s.

The BOGO silencer promo would have been tempting to me but for a few factors. In no particular order, then, here’s a partial listing: silencers are intended for pistols and rifles but useless with revolvers for reasons of physics and engineering; I’m useless with both pistols and revolvers, though I prefer the reliability of revolvers; silencers don’t silence anywhere nearly as much as movies would have us believe; while silencers are perfectly legal even in Connecticut, the feds stuck a $200 tax on the purchase of each one back in the thirties and that tax remains today.

On the other hand, I’d like to silence too many people to list. But that would only require putting socks in their mouths . . .