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Feb. 4, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
55:43
The Sound of Silence
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You wanna listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
We've got a great, great show for you today.
I'm excited because when I get to talk about going outside, when I get to talk about things that go boom, and even accessories such as suppressors, it just gets me excited because this is a great industry.
I grew up doing this, as you all well know.
And today we've got Brandon Maddox from Silencer Central here.
We're excited to talk all things suppressor, all things guns, and outdoors.
But Brandon, welcome to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Hey, thank you, sir.
Appreciate you having me.
Let's start off with you live in one of the coolest parts of the country.
I mean, I've traveled all over.
I'm a North Georgia fan, but South Dakota is a pretty good place up there.
Yeah, absolutely.
So my wife brought me here.
I probably wouldn't have much exposure here.
So yeah, definitely.
No, it's a good place.
As you know, the governor, Nome, is very popular.
And everyone asks her about her when they call in or when we visit with them.
So I would say, if anything, she's kind of helped put us on the map, especially around the old COVID thing.
Oh, yeah.
Christy, Governor, you know, Christy Noem is a good friend.
You were in Congress and worked with her.
She was one that we all, most people didn't realize that we would, a lot of the time in the morning, I would get up really early and she stayed in her office and a lot of us who stayed in our offices get up and work out in the gym and she would come in in the mornings and the rest of us out there, she would come in and she just, you know, you just didn't want to watch because, I mean, it put you to shame a little bit as she was going along.
She's got more energy than we all got.
But she's a good governor.
From what I can tell, she's made a really good business environment for South Dakota.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
100%.
A great advocate for the firearms too.
That is.
You know, and I think that's an interesting thing because, you know, her farm and, you know, taking on, you know, pheasant hunts, quail hunts, those kind of things, you know, really made, I mean, she understands it.
She's not one of those governors who have to say, oh, you have to, you need to think about the Second Amendment.
She says, no, I've lived it all my life.
She shoots better than most of us.
So that's a good time.
Well, tell us, let's just get started here.
We're going to get into the nuts and bolts of Class III and all these other kind of things later, but let's start off with the nuts and bolts of the suppressor.
Formerly, you know, commonly known silencers, we get this.
And I was talking with Larry King with the National Sports Shooting Foundation a few weeks ago on the podcast, and we got into this real discussion that, first off, why are suppressors treated so differently in the U.S.? And let's talk about what a suppressor is.
Yeah, good question.
You know, I've read a lot of legislative history on it to try to get a better understanding of why the suppressors are regulated really the same way that a machine gun is.
So the process that was made to regulate machine guns, silencers were thrown into that same process.
You know, the more I look at it, it's hard to find any true documentation as far as any notes that were taken or any background.
So everything that People perceive as somewhat guessed or assumed, but one theory was that Congress was looking at putting handguns into the National Firearms Act process, which is the way you buy a machine gun and a suppressor now, and that it was sort of a trade-out, hey, let's put silencers instead of handguns.
That's been one theory I've heard hypothesized.
The other theory is the laws were created in the 30s, so there was this concern that maybe people would poach neighbor's cattle if they had access to silencers, so that's potentially make them harder to get.
You know, in my mind, the thought is probably that there was really no advocate for it.
I mean, you obviously know better than I do about legislative issues, but if there's no advocate there to say, hey, why are we doing this, or question verbiage, or question The intent of what the goal is.
Sometimes things just slide through because there was no advocate there saying, hey, why are we doing this?
Why would we treat suppressors this harshly?
Why would we make them so hard to purchase?
Yeah, just based on all of my research over the last 17 years, I think it was probably just no advocate there for them.
I want to hit something here that you really brought out.
I think it would stun most people.
An accessory.
Now, let's make sure everybody out there, because we've got people who watch this podcast, listen to this podcast, who have been shooting like I have since I was knee-high to nothing.
We get it.
But there's some maybe out there who are watching this podcast who are scared of guns, never have been around guns, or maybe they're agnostic about guns, and they just sort of gloop everything together.
You made two very important points.
Number one, to buy a suppressor, a silencer, however you want to call it, it is an accessory to a gun.
It is not a gun in and of itself.
In fact, sitting here, it's like a muffler.
It by itself does nothing.
And yet you're making people purchase that with the same thorough background mess that you would buy a machine gun with.
I think if people understood that, I mean, the discrepancy there just doesn't make sense.
Yeah, you know, it's a difficult one.
Because, you know, the hard part is people will talk about, well, in Europe, you know, some places require you have a suppressor or silencer.
It's considered impolite not to shoot without one.
But there, it's very difficult to actually purchase the firearm.
It's hard to get the silencer here, but it's not easy to get a firearm, but it's easier, obviously, than it would be in Europe, so it's almost flipped.
But no, I agree 100%.
Talking about South Dakota, I had a suppressor stolen from an event we did, and it was difficult for me to get charges pressed because state law in South Dakota Does not define a silencer as a firearm, and the feds were kind of unwilling to take a first offender and throw him in jail for 10 years.
So it's interesting how, you know, I wouldn't say a lot of states, but there's quite a few states that don't define a silencer as a firearm like the feds do.
Well, famously, and I think this leads us into really our next part of this conversation as we continue on this whole issue of guns and Class III license and federal firearms license, you know, those kind of things like that.
But I always like to make sure that everybody's on the same page, no matter where they come from when they hit the show.
And the first thing is this.
Many people who either dislike guns or do not like the ability to have those guns, they take suppressors or silencers and they put them in what I'm going to call the James Bond.
They put them in the movie kind of mode.
And famously said, I think just a few years ago, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that she would oppose because we had a Hearing Protection Act, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
But she was talking about somebody brought up silencers or suppressors to her.
She said, I could never go along with making those easier because how would the police know who was shooting if they couldn't hear the gun?
Okay, that's just, I mean, I'm just gonna say what it is, it's stupid.
Okay, that's just ignorance about what a suppressor is.
To all of our folks out there, Brandon, here's your chance.
Tell us what a suppressor actually does, and does it really make a gun silent?
Yeah, that's a good question.
You know, I usually use the term silencer and suppressor interchangeably more so because my brain is wired to, A, what the consumer says and what the regulatory authorities say over me.
So, you know, the person that created the silencer, they called it a silencer in their patent.
The ETF, they call it legally a silencer.
I would say that the first-time customer, if they haven't bought one yet, they call it a silencer.
But anyone that's owned one, they call it a suppressor.
So essentially, it just suppresses sound.
It doesn't negate it.
So you're going to still hear the bullets cracking the sound barrier.
You're going to hear the, you know, the shot going off.
The real benefit to the user is that it's hearing safe.
So at this point, you don't have to wear earplugs.
And also, it's going to help with your recoil.
And also, there's some benefits from a hunting perspective if you're, you know, shooting at varmints and things like that where you might have an opportunity for follow-up shots.
But, yeah, 100%, she is, you know, the...
House Speaker there is going to be inaccurate in assuming or thinking that they're as quiet as they are in the movies.
And the reality is that creates this perception that they're illegal.
So I would say that, you know, I've been doing this about 17 years.
I would say literally the first five years, I would hear that at shows.
Well, how can you have these?
These are illegal.
And to sort of defend them, you know, I've seen a transition.
When I first started doing this, they were illegal in Iowa.
They were illegal in Minnesota.
So you've seen a transition to the positive on the Second Amendment issue.
I mean, if you think about the Second Amendment, the only real positives in my lifetime I've seen are, you know, positives on concealed carry.
That's kind of gotten, you know, first they were available concealed carry.
Now you have some states that have open carry or constitutional carry.
I think silencers are sort of in that same ballpark where a lot of states, not a lot, but there was, you know, probably half a dozen that were not legal that now have become legal in our lifetime.
But the other big push is just the states where you can hunt with them.
So, you know, there's 42 states where suppressor silencers are legal and there's 40 states where you can hunt with them.
And a lot of all these changes really have only happened in the last, you know, say 10 years.
So right now, from a suppressor standpoint, a silencer standpoint, are all 50 states, are they, judging what you were saying, are they, catch this update, are they legal, illegal, where we have loadouts, where would that be right now?
Yeah, good question.
So, of course, there's, so federally suppressors are legal in every state, but then states have individual laws that, you know, prohibit them.
The states that silencers are unlawful will be like your Californias, your Illinois, your Hawaii, your New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.
So basically what I would call your dark, dark blue states are the states where you don't have the freedoms.
That's where they're illegal.
Yeah.
When you started naming those down, I said, wow, which one's like the other here?
Because that's exactly what you got as you're going through here.
As we look at this, again, I want to emphasize this to folks who are listening to this.
The silencer, suppressor, whatever we call it, we'll interchangeably do it during this podcast, is an accessory to the weapon itself, to the gun itself.
It is not inherently, even when attached, but it's not inherently dangerous.
If anything, the suppressor itself has a health benefit to it from a shooter perspective.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah, obviously a suppressor doesn't work unless you have it on a firearm.
So, yeah, it's just, yeah, it's weird.
I mean, because, you know, sometimes people ask me, they'll say, do you ever have people who try to buy a silencer and they get disapproved?
It's kind of always a concern that, you know, customers have, you know, I hate to buy this, go through this process, and then find out later I'm disapproved.
I always say, if you can legally own a firearm, it's the same background check to buy the silencer.
But what I tell the general public is, Most people don't buy a silencer and allow us to tell the ATF that they want to put this on a firearm unless they can legally own a firearm.
So you just don't really see.
And the other thing is, you rarely ever find documentation where these are used in criminal acts.
Because if you look at the evolution of what you were talking about earlier, the Hearing Protection Act, You know, the ATF sort of leaked a white paper to Trump administration before they came into office saying, hey, we see some things that could be deregulated from a firearms perspective, and one of them was the suppressor.
And if the goal of the ATF is to be a public safety protector, but also enact the laws of Congress, sort of what they were saying was, we're enacting the laws, but we're not seeing it as a public nuisance or potentially creating a public health issue.
So we would be in favor of deregulating them as an agency.
Right.
Well, you just hit something that's really interesting, Brandon, and I want to touch on this a little bit.
Because, you know, whether they think it's illegal or anything else, The common notion of a silencer frankly goes back to movies and TV. That's where everybody gets their view upon what these are.
And if you see them used, they're typically used in criminal activities.
You never see this nice hunting video where you have a suppressor being used.
Right.
But there also is this, you know, playing out that, you know, their use is sort of illegal.
Do you ever get that sense that people not only think, well, hey, they're illegal, but there's something a little nefarious if you use a suppressor?
Yeah, no, I agree.
You know, it's funny, I was giving someone a tour through our facility here, and I could tell that she wasn't a gun person, and she just so happened to be with my wife, and I showed her our, you know, sort of secure cage, and I said, there's $100 million worth of silencers in there, and every one of them are sold.
And she just had this look on her face.
She's like, well, as a citizen, that's a bit concerning that these are that popular.
And I'm like, well, they're never used in, you know, criminal activity is very rare.
I mean, you can count them on a single hand over the last 10 years, how many, you know, criminal acts have occurred with a lawfully Purchased and owned suppressor and most of these people are just trying to protect their ears or to enhance their hunting experience There's no like you're saying nefarious activity or any reason why someone would want to be using them you know incorrectly all of our sales Just people wanting to protect their ears because they they want to protect what they have left because they are a shooter and have lost hearing and then also
they just want to Typically they're in a hunting scenario in a social environment where there's more than one person hunting with them and they want to be able to still talk and still hunt and enjoy the activity and not have to worry about wearing hearing protection.
Exactly.
Well, and that brings up, you know, the case you're sitting here looking at 100 men.
It's almost as if a non-gun individual, and I use that not pejoratively, but just someone who's not used to being around firearms, or they look at them and immediately think, you know, crime.
I mean, or murder, or something like that.
Let's also dispel something.
You've dispeled it with suppressors, but also let's just dispel legally purchased firearms.
Except in the situation many times, and this is again from a criminal activity, are rarely used.
Most criminals, they've done ATF, everybody's done these studies that show that 90 plus a percent of the firearms used in a criminal activity were not purchased legally or obtained legally.
Now, again, in reference, I will say that there are legally purchased firearms that are used in suicide and things like that, and that is acknowledged.
I'm not sure that that would change some of those outcomes, unfortunately.
My years of being a chaplain and others, I've seen those are just tragic situations that typically revert from something else.
But this is something we have to deal with, and it plays well.
That rhetoric plays well.
How do you think, from a suppressor industry standpoint, that we begin to, and I know laws have changed, other things have changed, what's been the biggest turnaround for people once they become familiar with what a suppressor actually does?
You know, it's just like the firearms part.
It's all about education.
I know that the American Suppressor Association, our trade organization, typically they try to take people to the range and actually get them out there to the point earlier that it's not silent.
You know, you still hear it.
It's just hearing safe.
But again, I think that the more people that purchase them and acquire them, I think of the state of South Dakota.
Before we really put the hard press as far as promoting our products, I think that there was an unknown, and if it was brought up, it was probably perceived in a negative light.
But now that you find most of the probably hobbyist hunters and professionals in the state, a large percentage of them are customers.
It's funny because my wife and I will see a lawyer on TV or a doctor or someone doing a commercial and I'll search and go, they might be a customer, honey.
I mean, it's just funny how people don't realize that I'd probably say that half of the male population in South Dakota that is into hunting and firearms, they've typically gotten a suppressor from us.
So I think that just from an educational standpoint, when people know someone that owns one or has gone through the process to buy one and see how rigorous it is, And then seeing the application and the usage, that's really where most of our sales come from, are people who've had a good experience with actually owning a suppressor and using it and then telling their friends about it.
Because the other day I was at a swim meet and my daughter was having, this guy walks up to me, he said, you remember me?
And I go, yeah, you're actually the first customer I had that used a gun trust back, you know, 15 years ago.
And he said, when I bought mine, all my friends said, I'll never own one, too expensive, too much paperwork, not worth the hassle.
He said, fast forward 15 years, every one of them own one.
It's just interesting to hear that story.
It is.
I've got friends down here.
I've got several friends.
One right now, I've always sort of joked that if I knew we were being invaded, I'm going to his house.
This guy buys new guns.
We're talking Class 3. We're talking fully automatic.
He buys them like people buy loaf bread.
As a gun breader, you probably get a kick out of the first bar.
You know, Browning Automatic Rifle that I ever shot, he had.
And that brought me back to World War II, and I'm reading a book about D-Day right now.
And this was the automatic weapon that turned the battles in Europe especially around.
And this guy had one, and it was just so hard for him to get though, because of everything going on.
Which leads me, I think, into our next...
Part of this discussion.
I think we sort of hopefully laid out the fact that a suppressor is simply nothing more than an accessory used to lower the decibels, you know, less recoil on a firearm.
Okay.
Again, no problems here.
It doesn't improve accuracy.
If you can't shoot straight, you've got a problem to start with.
A suppressor ain't going to help it.
You know, these kind of things like, you know, range shooting, that kind of thing.
But now we've also laid out that it's very hard, and I'm going to say very hard, I'm going to make that statement.
You don't have to, so if ATF is listening, blame Doug Collins, not Brandon Maddox.
I think it's way too hard to purchase a suppressor in this country, and especially with the paperwork side of it.
And you brought up something just a minute ago that many of the Class III license, those kind of things.
They use a trust.
So let's start off at ground zero.
If you're looking at this right now, do you have to do an elaborate setup?
If Joe Smith's out there listening to the podcast and they say, you know, I've had this 9mm, I have this other one, I want to put a suppressor on it.
Do they have to go set up a big financial situation to do it?
Has that gotten better?
Walk us through that.
Yeah, good question.
So, you know, I should almost take a step back.
The best analogy that I've come up with is think of buying a suppressor is very analogous to say buying your truck.
The only difference is you get to leave the lot with your truck and obviously with a suppressor you don't.
But in simplest terms, it's a title transfer.
So the title of ownership of the suppressor per the ATF is in our hands.
So when a suppressor is made, And if we're the manufacturer, it's in our name.
Or if we buy one, it's put into our name through the other dealers.
So we hold title to the suppressor.
All the paperwork we do, we're asking the feds to retitle the ownership from us, the dealer, to you, the customer.
And they'll do a background check to approve that.
And once they approve it, you know, the SignWinster Central's business model is we mail it to your front door.
So we're fortunate to have licenses in all 42 states where the suppressors are legal.
But to your question on, like, sort of setting it up, My honest truth is the most complex way to buy it is with a trust, but Silencer Central manages it for you.
We've been doing it long enough that I've met enough widows that they're sort of at this point of, gosh, now I've got this additional thing to deal with.
I have a suppressor that I don't know what to deal with.
I don't want it.
I don't know how to get rid of it, and I don't want to have to pay an attorney to help me figure this out.
So what we've done is we've sort of incorporated our entire business model and processes on giving each of our customers a 100% free trust that we had created by, you know, if you're in Georgia, we had an attorney in Georgia help us craft specifically to Georgia, and then we do all our paperwork wrapped around that.
So the trust actually owns the suppressor, and then that allows you to share it with other people, which is obviously a benefit.
If you have kids that are, you know, 18 or older and they want to use the suppressor when you're not there, It creates a joint ownership situation, but also it defines the legacy part.
So, you know, the trust will say that, you know, any lawful heir per state law can inherit this.
So, like, let's say you pass away, your spouse says, hey, he wants to give it to great-great-grandson Johnny, who's 18, and that basically just transitions directly to that person because the trust still owns it, and they're identified on the trust.
So, although most, if you walk into any gun store, most dealers are going to tell you not to do a trust because from their perspective it's more work.
And it creates a barrier between you purchasing it because now you've got to go find an attorney.
But from our perspective, looking at 20,000 feet and having done this for 17 years, we would say the trust is the best option because it allows you to share it and then define the legacy who gets it.
So it's something we set up for you free and we even help you manage it free.
The management part is, hey, I want to add my wife to it so she can use it when I'm not home.
Or it could be as simple as, I got a divorce, let's take her off.
So that kind of stuff, we can provide you the paperwork to update.
So definitely, you know, what I'm saying is going to probably differ from what other people say.
So that's why I'm trying to give some context to it.
But in my perspective, the trust is definitely the best way to go.
I think it also keeps it at an arm length distance.
You know, the ATF is going to do a background check on you to make sure you can lawfully own it.
But at the end of the day, the title of the silencer is going to show it's owned by a trust.
So it doesn't have specifically your name on there.
It's in the trust name.
So in my mind, it keeps it kind of an arm length distance with the ATF knowing, you know, specifically who owns it, who's in possession of it.
Well, and this brings up another question for me that's very, you know, I think just frustrating, irritating from my perspective.
And that is, if I bought the gun, let's just say, you know...
I have a 9mm that I wanted to put a suppressor on.
I'll just use that as a term.
Why, in the name of all that is good, would I buy that in January?
I bought my 43. In fact, I have one.
I have a Glock 43. I call it my W for a bush.
It's my W. But I bought it, say, in January.
And then I wanted to add, and I'm just using that as an example, and in March, you know, I say, you know, I've been going to the range, I want to put a suppressor on it.
Why?
Why?
And again, I know we went over this earlier, but I want to bring it out how ludicrous this is.
Why would I then have to have another background check?
It's almost like saying I needed to go buy a truck.
In fact, I bought a truck recently.
But if I wanted to go put a new muffler on it, I have to go through a credit check to get the muffler if I'm just paying cash.
I mean, it just...
Again, does the ATF see the hypocrisy in some ways in this?
You know, I suspect they do.
You know, and what clouds the issue even more is when Congress created the whole National Firearms Act, it's underneath the tax law because they do charge a $200 tax to acquire this.
So I talked earlier about the analogy of the truck.
I mean, it sort of holds true.
When you buy a truck, you've got to go pay the taxes at the courthouse for them to approve that title transfer.
Same concept with a suppressor.
You've got to pay the ATF $200.
That money goes directly to the Treasury, so it doesn't go to the ATF directly.
It feels like a sin tax.
It was created as 100% tax on a machine gun.
So in 1934, machine guns were $200 on average.
So they wanted 100% tax on them.
So that's kind of how that $200 tax was created.
And I know Obama asked the ATF during his tenure if it could potentially be raised based on inflation.
And they said that the code wasn't written that way.
So fortunately for us, it stayed at $200, which hopefully the $200 tax will stay the same.
But No, that's the hard part because there's the Gun Control Act, which looks at regular firearms, and there's the National Firearms Act.
They're kind of two different laws.
I mean, you know, I've done a lot of work with this area because, you know, like there's certain states, and I'm going to have to look, but I think Georgia might be one of them, that if you have a concealed carry permit and you're in the state of Georgia, every time you buy a firearm, I don't think that the dealer has to do a background check.
So South Dakota is that way, and it took about seven years of me Working with the legislator and the governor and the Sheriff's Association, but now if you buy a firearm in South Dakota, you just throw your driver's license out and then there's really no background check during the five years that you have your concealed carry permit.
But no, I agree.
I think the problem is ATF's just enforcing the laws that Congress wrote and Congress probably said in 1934 that if you buy a suppressor you need to have a background check to confirm you can legally own and possess it and that they just have to do it each time because they probably didn't put a disclaimer in there that You know, if you have a concealed carry, you don't have to.
Or if you bought a firearm recently, you don't have to.
So I agree, it's unfortunate.
Well, the concealed carry permit, yes, it does cut down here in Georgia.
You know, I can go purchase, show my concealed carry, and that gets me through.
You know, I can purchase and take away the same day kind of thing.
And I think that's the one issue.
The other question that does come to mind here, and you've hit on it, everything, you know, someone who served in the federal government for a while and at higher levels, you know, look, everything in D.C. revolves around money.
If, and this would be one of the first things, and I have heard this from members especially who didn't like firearms to start with, they said, well, if you do away with this, you know, sin tax, whatever you want to call it, on suppressors, how much are we talking?
Brandon, what are we talking to the federal government on this tax that is put on these accessories?
Yeah, no, good question.
And so last year there was about You know, based on my math, about 700,000 silencers were made.
And if you put $200 tax on each of those, that's $140 million.
So it's, yeah, it's a big number.
You know, I think that I just, you know, and I wasn't as close to the whole Hearing Protection Act, you know, as far as the legislative perspective, but I do know that $200 tax was a hot potato.
And I think it probably hurt our industry because...
The manufacturer said, I don't want to pay that $200 tax.
And the dealer said, I don't want to pay the $200 tax.
The consumer said, well, I don't want to pay.
No one owned it.
No one said, hey, we'll take the $200 tax so we can get this Hearing Protection Act passed.
I think that if the people writing the Hearing Protection Act went back and said, hey, who's going to take the $200 and no one's willing to take it, it's hard to move legislation forward if not everyone's on the same page from an industry perspective.
But yeah, that's $140 million that's going directly to the Treasury.
You know better than all of us that the Treasury is going to say, where's that $140 million going to come from if you're going to change the law?
They're going to want their money from somewhere.
Well, and that's part of the problem we have in Congress.
You're exactly right.
That's part of the problem with bills.
If it's perceived as a cost from the Congressional Budget Office, then you have to have a pay-for.
What's your pay-for if you're going to take the $140,000?
What's your pay-for?
Again, I think it's a very wrong concept to have in government because it never allows you really to downsize the government because you're always having to basically fund or exempt the rules from not doing that.
In some ways, it's actually good.
So when we do, you know, really dumb, big government projects, you have to pay for them.
But again, most of the time, we just simply add on, you know, tax or add on something or fees, anything as you go at it.
Getting to...
More interesting, because right now, this industry is really growing.
I think the Hearing Protection Act, for those who are out there who don't know, is really trying to modernize the suppressor industry.
I was part of this in another industry called music, which was dominated by 100-year-old laws.
Don't you think most people, it would be hard for them to understand that your industry, which is so dynamically changed, is roughly governed by 90-year-old laws?
Yeah, no, it's tough.
I think the hard part too is for the governing body to sort of, and you know, it's hard to know exactly how many people bought into that, but if it was leaked from the higher-ups at ATF that they were open to looking at potentially deregulating it, treating a silencer like a regular firearm.
Yeah, I mean, it's tough.
You know, the hard part is just thinking, you know, would it potentially change in the future?
And I think that Our goal, obviously, is that more people that own suppressors now are going to be able to educate more voters and that hopefully as more people use them and the word gets out that they're not evil, they're not 100% silent, they're not used in nefarious acts, does that lower the threshold where people feel a little bit more comfortable with, all right, let's deregulate them?
Because, of course, the left's going to say, hey, it's so highly regulated, that's why you're not having any problems.
It's so hard to get.
They're highly vetted.
Because I think Pelosi had said too, hey, we ought to put ARs into that NFA process.
They love the idea of it's taxed, there's a background check, there's a gun registry, they know who owns it, they know where it's stored.
So from a left gun control perspective, the NFA And their whole processes are really where they'd like to see every firearm.
Exactly.
And there's this whole, you know, it's the one area that I've seen in public policy and you coming, because you've not always been in the pharmaceutical industry.
You were in the pharmaceutical industry at one point, correct?
Yes, sir.
Yeah.
So I am a pharmacist by, you know, licensure in trade and education, and I spent most of my career in pharmaceuticals.
So, you know, I learned really quick when you moved to South Dakota, you don't have the population density you do have on the East Coast.
It's like how do you pivot and find something else that is a fun career and you also can grow.
Well, and I think you bring out an interesting...
You and I could have probably a whole other podcast on what I perceive as the evils of the PBM world.
Yeah, true.
Believe me, they don't like me, and I'm not particularly fond of them, but from what I saw they do to independent pharmacists.
But again, this is what happens when government looks for easy outlets many times.
I mean, if you're saving money or you think that this is actually the perception, well, if we keep these more regulated, then everybody is doing better.
And the reality is...
The real world doesn't play that out.
The real world says that the people who use suppressors are law-abiding, you know, good people who simply enjoy hunting, and they enjoy shooting, and they enjoy not having to wear hearing protection when they're doing these things, and nobody's getting hurt in that regard.
Yeah, no, I think that, you know, it sort of leads into, during the Obama administration, 2014 and 15, oddly enough, The ATF launched e-forms, where basically the whole process was digital.
Now, it went down in 2015, but the good news is it went back up in December of 2021. So, you know, the Feds, because most of the customers that buy suppressors are wealthy, well-accomplished, registered voters.
You know, I think of my clients, even here in South Dakota, they're calling their congressmen, they're calling their senators, and they're saying, This is ridiculous.
I'm waiting a year to get a tube that, you know, it's not even a firearm, it can't shoot.
And I think that there was enough pressure through Congress, through congressional inquiries, through just pressure, just because of the amount of headcount and money the ATF is spending to process all these forms, the Feds have finally caved and realized that the best approach is to make it digital.
So the benefit to people wanting to get a suppressor to get into the market is that the ATF now has an all-digital process, which they're saying they're going to staff to 90-day turnaround.
So that goal is now it would be a two-month to a three-month wait instead of potentially what now is close to a year.
Well, and you just hit on it.
I'm glad you brought this up because that was really sort of where I was heading.
Because the next question is, realistically, and I'm going to make it even sort of a little bit more simple than let's just say in South Dakota.
A person who has a concealed carry permit in South Dakota walks in to their local gun store or they call you at Silencer Central and they say, hey, I want to buy this silencer.
This is the one I want.
Here's my money.
How long does it typically take them, given this backlight?
And I was part of the ones who were putting pressure on ATF to streamline this, because they were putting it back to paper, and it was just, you know.
And you had people inside the bureaucratic arm of the ATF who didn't want to process these.
They viewed them as a problem, I think is what we were seeing.
So go back to, you know, Jim goes into Sioux Falls today, local gun store, whatever, comes into your shop.
How long does it take them to actually possess the suppressor?
You know, it's probably about 10 months.
I mean, that's the reality.
Yeah.
I mean, the good thing about Silencer Central is, you know, we've been working with the ATF closely.
You know, I had a call yesterday for an hour with their top leadership and we met with them at SHOT Show, you know, last week, their whole leadership.
You know, we have a good working relationship with them.
Our process is mostly digitized, so a lot of the paperwork we can do digitally and the customer can do from the comfort of their own home.
So that's not the hard part.
I mean, we have Inventory City on the shelf.
That's not the hard part.
It's just that they're bottlenecked at they touch the paperwork 41 times from when it leaves our office here in Sioux Falls till it comes back here approved.
You know, it goes to Oregon, they cash the check, they data entry it, then it goes to West Virginia where the branch is that reviews them, and then it just sort of passes around through that office in a In a paper format until it's then approved and then mailed back to us.
So they only have 40 to 45 people doing that process now, and it's just, it's not enough headcount.
What are they, I mean, okay, and again, this is, for folks out there listening to the podcast here, you know, Randomatic Silencer Central is here, and we're talking about this.
This is where people get very frustrated with government.
No, totally.
Yeah, totally.
So, you know, one interesting piece of the puzzle, and it doesn't necessarily, you know, I speak positively about the local dealers, but they're telling me, the ATF's telling me, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, they spend 60% of their day sending paperwork back to the dealer that filled it out incorrectly.
There's just so much paperwork as far as, you know, customers' information and, you know, fingerprints and photos.
It's just, it's literally, it's like applying to get a federal farms license to be a dealer.
I've often said I can actually become a A firearms dealer and sell firearms easier than the paperwork is to buy a suppressor.
I'll also say that about, you know, Las Vegas.
You can't get an FFL federal firearms license in Las Vegas, but you can get a license to sell marijuana, which to me just, you know, it seems crazy.
They make it so hard to become a gun dealer, but if you want to sell marijuana, totally no problem.
But, you know, oddly enough, the ATF literally does spend a ton of their time processing paperwork that they're sending back to the dealer that was filled out incorrectly.
And it's so much back and forth with the dealer from a paperwork perspective.
So the benefit to them going digitally is it's forcing everything to be data entry real time and it's sort of checking it to make sure that everything is there so that when you hit submit it's done and if it's not done right they just reject it and you have to start over.
So you know it's not it sounds like I'm defending ATF being behind but the problem is you have a lot of small mom-and-pop gun shops they might sell one suppressor a month they don't really understand All the things, the intricacies on the paperwork.
The paperwork changed in August of 2016 based on some executive orders from Obama, so it's been a moving target, a moving goalpost, if you will.
And just because of that, you know, a lot of the paperwork is back and forth with the dealer.
It's just they call them error letters where they're sending it to the dealer saying hey we don't have what we need and just this back and forth but you know the reality is they've probably been unwilling to scale up to hire the staffing they need hoping that they could get this e-forms in place so I'm in hopes that's gonna fix it I know a lot of people were you know hopeful the hearing protection act would go through obviously we were as well I wasn't confident that it was gonna be able to get through so You know,
I was working with our U.S. Senator Thune on how can we get the funding to sort of help fund this e-forms process.
Because most of my customers, I mean, I have maybe a wealthier clientele, and to them, the $200 tax stamp and the price of the suppressor is not to issue.
It's the wait time.
So sort of taking that consumer insight, we went to our senators and congressmen and said, how do we get more money for the ATF? We were able to help facilitate some of that.
And then when it went into place through the Trump administration putting the money into the budget, we feel like that that's going to help a little bit.
So if guys can get a suppressor in 60 days, they're going to be less upset.
It's not necessarily the tax and the money.
It's more of just the wait time.
So it's sort of like fighting each battle each time.
So if we can fix the wait time, then now let's work on continuing to deregulate them.
But at least we got one win with the wait time.
You just brought up a question in my mind, and I've not thought about this, but I was just curious.
I'm going to use myself.
I'm a concealed carry owner.
I've been that way for years.
I own firearms.
If I was looking at this, and we see the process going through here, the digitize would make it, I mean, 60 days still is outrageously, stupidly long to me, when you've got email that can go back and forth in a matter of seconds.
But you brought up something that triggered a thought.
If I wanted to get my FFL, if I wanted to get a federally licensed firearm dealer, if I wanted to do that, what is that process?
Because there might be some listeners who are saying, look, I'm just tired of dealing with this and I want to buy a vintage firearm.
I want to buy a...
What is the process to do that?
Because I think you are one.
And so the question is, how long would it take?
What's the difference?
If I'm waiting 10 months for a suppressor, why don't I just go full in?
Yeah, no, that's a good question.
So...
One thing I probably didn't mention in the beginning is I own a website called FFL123.com and for about 17 years I've helped people get their federal farms license and I think that's what helped us expand as rapidly as we did.
I have 43 federal farms licenses that are in my corporation name.
We're in every state where silencers are legal.
What's interesting about the process of buying a suppressor is there's a 60-day window on the ATF that they have to respond.
And that's very different than the suppressor.
So if you apply to be a licensee, to get your federal farms license, then the feds have 60 days to respond to your request.
So it puts a fuse, if you will, or a stopwatch on them where they have to respond within that many days.
They'll use it to their advantage and they'll use it against you.
You know, if you have some open items you need to resolve, they'll say, pull your application and reapply because you're hurting the 60-day timeline.
But then they'll also use it, you know, kind of against you, you know, like, hey, if you can't pull all this together, but if you call them and it's already been 60 days, they'll say, oh, well, we get some, you know, leverage.
We can go outside that.
It's just a guideline.
But federal statutes do say it's kind of a, you know, either...
The other interesting thing is they will never deny your application.
They'll ask you to withdraw it, which is somewhat interesting to me.
But the big caveat with the federal farms license is They won't issue it if it's for personal use.
It really has to be for, you know, a business use, meaning that maybe you're facilitating local transfers or your buddies are buying stuff online and having a ship to and you're doing the paperwork there.
If it's 100% personal, they're not going to issue it for you, but you have to be able to find a way to say, hey, I want to use it for myself, but also I'm going to use it to help with transfers and work gun shows and things like that.
And to do buy and sell.
I mean, that's the other issue.
And even that, they have the 60 days to respond, but I think this is going to blow some people's minds.
Even if you have that, You're still waiting, many times, if you're purchasing a suppressor for a gun that you own and you're trying to sell it to another person, you're still waiting on the suppressor to go through this other process approval, correct?
Yeah, even me as a federal firearms licensee, if I fill out the paperwork and put my license on there, it's still a pretty long time, because that's the way you do machine guns, typically.
So, you know, the silencers of machine guns can't cross state lines, so like, if I bought a machine gun from you in Georgia, It'd have to be transferred to like a dealer in the state where I would live if I weren't a dealer so on those it is a transfer on the same forms that like a silencer would be and it still takes you know six months and even if you have a license so it just you know they just sit in piles there in the paperwork that's why you know sometimes our customers will say hey I changed my mind on buying a silencer I want to kind of pull the plug on this purchase I always tell them hey there's really no way to stop
the train after it's left the station because They don't really have them that well organized.
It's not like a library where they can say, well, here's Brandon's form, let's just pull it out.
I mean, they're all in stacks and they're working them as they go, as they get to them.
They don't really have a system where they can pull things out and say, let's rework it or change it.
Well, yeah, and I think that's the part that so many people don't understand.
We spend a lot of time on the government and their problems around this.
Tell us a little bit, though, I want you to, you know, because you're Silencer Central.
I mean, you can go online, silencercentral.com.
You can find your product.
Tell us what's new and exciting.
I was supposed to be at SHOT Show.
We ended up with that virus issue, and I couldn't get there, and I was looking forward to being out there with you guys.
But...
You know, tell us what's new.
For folks who are looking at suppressors, you've got some great product line.
Talk to us about your company and how it's doing.
Yeah, good question.
So, Silencer Central, you know, really we started as South Dakota Silencer back in 2005. We evolved then to Dakota Silencer, and then we evolved to Silencer Central.
We started out more as an events-based company.
We worked gun shows, farm shows, sportsman shows.
And, you know, just the goal at Silencer Central is to make the process super simple.
Some things we've done to make the process simple.
We let people pay while they wait.
So, if a guy says, hey, I want to put 200 bucks down and just have it paid off before it's approved, can I do that?
The answer is yes.
There's no interest.
I mean, the goal is to make it easy from a pay perspective.
You know, I mentioned earlier, we're licensed in all 42 states, so we can mail it to your front door once it's approved.
You know, that was a huge benefit in COVID. It's really a huge benefit to most people.
It's almost the Amazon experience where you can buy something from your couch.
It shows up at your home.
It's a hard concept for people to swallow with silencers, but we've worked with the ATF. We know our federal laws.
We know our state laws, so we're on top of that.
It works.
We're mailing out 100,000 suppressors a year to people all across the U.S. We thread barrels.
A lot of people say, hey, how do I get the suppressor on the end of my rifle?
We'll send you an empty rifle case.
You put your rifle in.
You ship it here.
We've got a machine shop.
We've got a gunsmith that takes your gun apart.
Machinist puts the rifle barrel in there.
We have a CNC lathe that threads at 90 seconds, and then we mail it back to your front door.
We talked earlier about making the trust for you.
We do all the paperwork for you digitally.
We can send it to you where you're just signing stuff on your smartphone, like DocuSign.
Same process on the back end to mail it to your front door.
As far as products, you know, SignWinster Central, we're a dealer.
We can sell anything.
So if someone sees a product they want, call and talk to us about it.
We also have our own line of products called Banish products.
And what we found is customers typically don't want to put a lot of weight on the end of their barrels.
So you'll find that our Banish line of suppressors are typically 100% titanium just because it's really light and it's stronger than steel.
And we also, the Banish line comes apart to clean, which is nice.
A lot of armament hunters, a lot of shooters, you know, they like to clean their firearms.
So they also like to be able to clean their suppressors, really all of them.
As far as the suppressor line, we have stuff that covers everything from a.22 rimfire, 17, all the way up to the bigger stuff that you would see.
The big straight wall cartridges that you hear about, the.458 SOCOM, the bigger stuff that some states require for hunting.
Probably the most popular suppressor we have is the Banish 30. Think of it as a multi-caliber.
Most guys will buy the Banish 30 They'll use it on their.223, their.270, their.30-06, their.308, their.300 Win Mag, their.300 Weatherby.
They like the idea of a titanium lightweight suppressor that they can use on their Magnum rifles, but all the way down to their other smaller centerfire rifles.
So people like that idea of not necessarily one and done, but just this multi-caliber concept that you can cover more than one rifle.
And especially for hunting, it's a huge benefit if you've not ever hunted with a suppressor.
I mean, I think you mentioned earlier, I'm a Southern boy, raised in Alabama, Georgia.
And when I moved to South Dakota, I don't know that I had a concept of what prairie dogs were, but once I saw them running, I saw them running all over these fields and there's farmers were excited to get rid of them.
I was like, I think I can help you with your problem.
And I became somewhat obsessed with shooting prairie dogs.
And once you put a suppressor on there, it's a hundred percent game changer.
You know, You go from shooting two or three and they go under and hide for an hour to, you know, you basically get to lay lead down the range all day long which is fun to, it's basically prairie rats is what it is.
People want to get rid of them.
I mean, when you hear the word prairie dog, people get upset about dog, but they're basically rats that eat grass.
Yeah.
Well, and the part of it is for out there, your farmers, your ranchers out there, I mean, they dig holes, and they cause problems for cattle.
They cause problems for horses.
They cause problems for everything else.
So I had some good friends up in Montana, and that was, you know, the only sort of joke is, what do you do for fun?
Well, we go shoot prairie dogs.
You know, that was...
Totally.
Yeah.
I mean, it's some good stuff.
I mean, you know, and this is...
Again, it's amazing to me that when you do this, you're talking about people who do this legally, they fully enjoy the rights of owning a firearm, and they understand the responsibility that goes along with that.
This is my frustration in this industry, and among many people who want to take guns and move guns, they try to blame a problem that's not related necessarily in a straight line to remove those rights from those who do it Right, and to me it's just sort of crazy as we go there.
But Silent Central is sort of the one-stop shop for that, and I think that's what people need when it is so confusing.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I always say that's my consumer insight.
I mean, I know my wife thought I was crazy.
I did undergrad in pharmacy school at Chapel Hill, and then I got an MBA from Duke.
My wife's like, you want to go work gun shows?
What are you thinking?
I'm like, It's so weird.
I came from a sales and marketing background in pharmaceuticals, and the first gun show I worked, I basically had half of a table because they didn't have any tables open.
I just put a bed sheet down.
I had two used silencers that were all beat to hell, and I had the largest crowd of anyone in the entire gun show.
And I spoke with authority because I knew probably 1% more than everyone in the room, and it just sort of grew from there.
But my insight from the customer Standing at my booth at a show is I love the idea of reducing recoil.
I love the idea of protecting my ears.
I love the idea of enhancing my hunt, but I don't want to deal with the paperwork.
So when I tell them I could do all your paperwork in about three minutes here at my booth or over the phone, most people go, I'm in.
Let's do it.
And that's kind of how we started.
And over the last 17 years, laws have changed slightly over time, but we've worked with the ATF on Hey, could we send this digitally to the customer?
Could they do their fingerprints at home and mail them back to us and not have to go to the sheriff's office because of COVID? Sheriff's offices are closed.
I mean, all these little things, you know, could we create a trust for them?
Could we help them set it up where the trust owns the suppressor?
So sort of that journey over the last 17 years has been how do we make the process easy?
Because my experience is once you convince the customer that we've got the process nailed and that we've been doing it for 17 years and this is all we do, we only do suppressors, and that we talk to the ATF literally daily, They get very comfortable with that, and the next question they ask is, how do I get started and what product should I buy?
And that's the way it is.
You know, it is a shame to me, as we're closing up here with Brandon Maddox from Silence of Central, it is a sad thought to me that our federal government, on an issue such as this, the problem is not price, the problem is not quality, the problem is not the product itself, the problem is the process of the federal government to actually get it.
And I want our listeners to understand something.
When the federal government is the problem, then you see our problem, if you understand what I'm saying.
Because that...
I mean, if you'd come to me and say, you know, Doug, I'm having trouble selling it because I'm too...
I mean, my price is high.
It's complicated to use.
None of that's true.
Your problem is the end result, not the actual product itself.
Yeah.
No, it's interesting.
I mean, of course, my roots are...
I would say I'm a libertarian.
I'm kind of like the government's too involved in everything.
So...
And that's kind of my base.
That's where I'm at.
But the hard part with the ATF is they'd say, Brandon, we're just enforcing Congress's laws.
So if you don't like it, have them change it and we'll enforce whatever they come up with.
So it is, you know, people will kind of yell at us about sometimes the delay with the ATF and they'll sort of want to put that on our lap.
And we say, hey, the only thing we can do is submit it, process it, get it to them correctly.
And then it's up to them to actually approve it.
And, you know, sometimes it does take some reminders.
I mean, they're a big bureaucracy, and they don't have sort of the technology advancements that we have as an industry.
So it does take some hand-holding to keep them moving things forward.
But, you know, we do have a good working relationship with them, and it's not always easy, but we've just kind of accepted the realities.
Exactly.
Well, folks out there listening to the podcast, you know, get to know your federal legislator.
What he just said is right.
And as one who was in the belly of that for several years and is a top-ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees Judiciary, which oversees ATF, I'll tell you right now.
It's amazing what members will say, and maybe just individuals, but when it comes up to saying, taking a stand, that the liberal media many times don't want to, they don't want to touch or they're going to cast in a bad light, they'll back off.
We've got to have some members of, and those of us who stood with the Heron Protection Act, those of us who worked to get this right, making public safety number one, but also making it very Smart and common sense at the ATF is something we've got to have.
Brandon, this has been a joy that's been fun for me.
I mean, anytime we talk about things that go boom and things that go boom a little bit quieter is exciting for me.
I'm a huge proponent of Second Amendment and the shooting sports that we have in hunting.
So, again, it's great to have you with me.
From South Dakota, great governor, great company.
Folks, Brandon Mack, Silencer Central, you'll want to be a part of seeing more about them, especially if you're looking to buy A suppressor.
You're looking to buy a silencer and you just don't want to deal with the hassles of the paperwork.
This is the folks to go see.
Brandon, thanks for being a part of the Doug Collins podcast today.
Yes, sir.
We appreciate that.
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