Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) used a House Oversight Committee roundtable on Wednesday to push back on what he called the left’s ‘myths’ about gun suppressors — and to call for removing barriers that keep law-abiding Americans from buying them.
Crane’s comments came during a question-and-answer session with a panel that included Knox Williams of the American Suppressor Association, retired Deputy Assistant ATF Director Peter Forcelli, and Lawrence Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
‘Pretty ignorant’ officials
Crane suggested that some elected officials are slow to lift restrictions on suppressors ‘because they are pretty ignorant about what they actually do’ — and that many of them get their information from movies rather than real-world experience.
‘I own several myself, and you watch these Hollywood movies and it makes them sound like they are whisper quiet and that’s not the case at all,’ Crane said, with Williams concurring.
Suppressors, often called silencers in popular culture, do reduce the sound of a gunshot, but they don’t make it anywhere near silent — a point Second Amendment advocates have made for years in arguing that federal regulation of the devices is based on misperceptions.
Crime concerns rejected
Crane also took aim at the argument that broader suppressor access would lead to more crime. He asked Forcelli — a veteran law enforcement officer — how many times suppressors came up in his investigations over the course of his career.
Forcelli’s answer: ‘Two.’
And those two instances, he said, weren’t tied to ‘violent criminal acts.’ Instead, the suppressors were discovered during the execution of search warrants.
Crane then turned to Keane, a former prosecutor, to ask whether his experience lined up with Forcelli’s.
‘I never encountered a case involving a suppressed firearm,’ Keane responded.
Harder to conceal
The panel also noted that adding a suppressor to a pistol increases the size of the gun, making it harder to conceal — and therefore less attractive to criminals looking to carry a weapon discreetly.
Keane pointed to the surge in suppressor demand, noting that there are now roughly 6.65 million suppressors in civilian hands. He argued that the exponential growth in suppressor ownership has not coincided with any ‘increase in the use of suppressors in crimes.’
Under current federal law, suppressors are regulated under the National Firearms Act, which requires buyers to undergo a lengthy application process, pay a $200 tax, and pass an FBI background check — a system that can take months to navigate.
Legislative push
Crane’s remarks add to a broader push in Congress to ease access to suppressors, with some lawmakers arguing they are primarily used by sportsmen to protect their hearing at the range. The Hearing Protection Act, which would remove suppressors from NFA regulation entirely, has been introduced in previous sessions but has not advanced.
The roundtable was part of the House Oversight Committee’s ongoing focus on Second Amendment issues, and Crane’s questions highlighted the gap between popular depictions of suppressors and their actual use in crime — a gap he says policymakers should close with facts, not fiction.
While the committee did not vote on any legislation during the roundtable, the discussion is likely to inform future proposals as gun-rights advocates continue to press for deregulation of what they call ‘safety devices’ rather than tools of criminals.
This article is based on reporting by AWR Hawkins for Breitbart News.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2026/09/03/rep-eli-crane-we-should-be-clearing-the-way-to-suppressor-access/