If you hang out in this hallowed space, you clearly like guns. If you like guns and you don’t live under a rock someplace, you already know the news. President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”, which recently passed the House, includes a snippet of language that removes sound suppressors from the purview of the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA). This came about by the bill including Section 2 of the Hearing Protection Act. Trust me, this is a really big deal.
I’m not a lawyer. I took civics in high school, but that’s the extent of my practical education on the American legislative process. However, I have been a gun nerd for as long as I can remember. Live in this space long enough, and you start to pick up some things about how the American legislative system works. My mission today is to mine the details and explore a few what-if’s regarding how this could all shake out.
American Governance 101
My source is the Internet, but I have done a fair amount of reading. If I miss a few details, please forgive me in advance. As I said, I’m not a lawyer.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is House Resolution 1 (HR1) for the 119th Congress. The bill was introduced in the House of Representatives. To become law in America, a bill is debated in one house, tweaked as needed to gain sufficient consensus, and then passed. Then it goes to the other chamber, where the same thing happens.
These two approved bills are usually, by this point, pretty different. A conference committee then hammers out those differences into something both chambers can tolerate, and there is a final vote. If that final bill passes both the House and the Senate, it then goes to the President’s desk for signature. If signed by the President, the bill then becomes law.
Passage in the House or the Senate requires a simple majority. However, in the Senate, the minority party can filibuster a bill. The sordid details don’t matter, but when that happens, it takes a 60-vote majority to override the filibuster. The filibuster was originally supposed to be a nuclear option that was used only in extreme cases. In our currently polarized world, the filibuster is seemingly used on a whim. As a result, many things can’t get through the Senate without a 60-vote supermajority.
Republicans currently outnumber Democrats in the House 220 to 212. The Republicans hold the Senate 53 to 47. Those 47 include two Independents who traditionally caucus with the Democrats. HR1 passed 215-to-214 in the House.
The consensus seems to be that if your team is in power, the filibuster is a travesty. If the other team is driving, it’s a blessing. The filibuster is one of the biggest reasons so little gets done in Washington these days. However, HR 1 is not a conventional bill. It is a budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliations are immune to the filibuster and pass via a simple majority. That is the only reason we might now see sound suppressors taken off of the NFA. Let me explain.
Details
As I currently understand it, the primary language in HR 1 that concerns sound suppressors simply removes them from the purview of the NFA completely. Should this pass, suppressors would be treated like Title 1 firearms. You would transfer them through an FFL dealer with a NICS check and a Form 4473. That means no more transfer taxes, fingerprints or processing time. More importantly, I believe it should also mean no more national registry of suppressor owners.
As you can imagine, the opponents are apoplectic over this. Expect them to do everything they can to get this removed in the Senate. It could get better, however. Stuff can yet still be added to this bill once it hits the Senate. Who knows, maybe a 2A-friendly senator manages to get the NFA restriction on short-barreled rifles and shotguns removed so the only thing the NFA would regulate would be machine guns, destructive devices like cannons and grenade launchers, and AOWs (Any Other Weapons). AOWs can be things like handguns with vertical foregrips, guns that don’t look like guns, pistol-gripped short-barreled shotguns, and similar stuff.
Potential Outcomes
This could shake out along a spectrum from bad to awesome. Worst case, all of the gun stuff comes out of the bill and we’re stuck with things just like they have been since 1934 — draconian transfer taxes, scads of paperwork and massive artificial impediments to silencer ownership. If that happens, the legislators who are ultimately responsible for that will earn the righteous ire of tens of millions of thoroughly energized voters.
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Deadliest Battles You Never Learned About
The German MP43 revolutionized infantry tactics. This extraordinary rifle
went on to shape combat weapons all the way to the present day.
With the crystalline clarity of hindsight, we all know how the Battle of the Bulge turned out. The Germans called it Operation Wacht am Rhein (translation: Watch on the Rhine). They picked this defensive-oriented moniker intentionally in hopes that the Allies might not expect a massive offensive focused on seizing the Belgian port of Antwerp. They were lyrically successful, at least at the very beginning.
Against all odds, the Allied lines held. They were pushed back to form the bulge on the commander’s maps that gave the massive battle its name, but there was not the wholescale rupture of American defenses for which Hitler had hoped. Eventually, the Germans ran out of gas and momentum, spiked their guns, and retreated in disarray. We all know that now. In the closing days of 1944, in the chaotic forests of the Ardennes, however, the outcome of the battle and the war was still anybody’s guess. For the grunts on the ground, this must have been terrifying.
The man was an Army surgeon who volunteered before Uncle Sam could draft him. Amidst the cold and the chaos of the Bulge, time had little meaning. He was a healer working in a butcher’s shop. The steady stream of shredded meat eventually just ran together. He had been operating for longer than he could remember. There was just no shortage of business.
The tent was well-lit and heated. It was also prominently marked with a huge red cross. The exhausted physician operated on friend and foe alike. By the time he saw them, the uniforms had already been cut away. Whether it was olive drab or field gray, the shattered bodies underneath all looked the same.
From left to right we have the Combloc M43 7.63x39mm, the
German 7.92×33 kurz, and the full-power German 7.92x57mm rounds.
The sounds of firing grew ever closer. Joachim Pieper’s Kampfgruppe Pieper was drawn from the 6th Panzer Army and included the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion equipped with the latest Tiger II tanks. As Pieper’s fanatical SS troops approached, the noise and the chaos got worse. Eventually, the crack of tank rounds and artillery bursts shook the ground underneath the tent that served as an operating theater. Shrapnel tore through the canvas roof. Throughout it all, the surgeon kept working.
There was a burst of fire outside the tent that carried an unfamiliar cadence, and a camouflaged soldier barged through the gaping flap. He wore the characteristic smock and cloth helmet cover of the Waffen SS and carried a strange rifle with a long-curved magazine. This man was breathless from exertion and adrenaline. For a pregnant moment, everything stopped.
The SS trooper surveyed the accumulated wounded and raised his rifle. Without much conscious thought, the surgeon dropped his instrument and wrapped his bloody gloved hands around a nearby carbine. Before the SS villain could machinegun his wounded, the exhausted surgeon shot him five times in the chest. Satisfied that the threat was no longer threatening, the Army surgeon dropped the little rifle and went back to his surgery. War is hell.
The strange rifle this maniacal SS man was carrying was the radically advanced MP44. Allied troops encountering it for the first time often called it “that German Buck Rogers gun” after the science fiction serials of the 1930s. Given how revolutionary the weapon was in comparison with its contemporaries, such sci-fi references certainly seem justified.
The MP43 is exceptionally controllable, even on full auto.
Despite being wielded by some of the most despicable villains
in human history, the MP43 was a truly groundbreaking design.
The spark that became the MP44 actually germinated in 1918. A German Hauptmann Piderit, part of the Gewehrprüfungskommission (“Small Arms Examination Committee”) of the German General Staff in Berlin, penned a paper suggesting that full-power rifle rounds were excessive for the modern battlefield. This seed eventually germinated into the 7.92x33mm kurz round in 1938.
The 7.92×33 kurz was 24mm shorter than the standard 7.92x57mm round used by the German military and packed exactly half the powder charge. This cut the round’s effective range down to around 400 meters, but it yet remained cheaper to make and easier to run. The ameliorated recoil also made the cartridge amenable to use in selective fire weapons.
The first combat trials of the MKb 42(H) and MKb 42(W) began on the Eastern Front in 1942. Developed by Haenel and Walther, respectively, both weapons fired the stubby 7.92x33mm kurz round out of the same 30-round curved box magazines. Certain attributes were taken from both weapons to form the definitive MP43. This rifle was eventually called the MP44 and the StG44, but they were all essentially the same gun.
The MP43 weighed a whopping 11 pounds 5 ounces loaded, but it was made predominantly from inexpensive steel stampings and was, therefore, relatively cheap. Its prodigious weight also made the gun exceptionally controllable. In so doing, the MP43 changed the world.
The basic design of the MP43 ultimately influenced the AK47 and morphed into every modern assault rifle in the world. The M4, the FN SCAR, the HK G36, and the Israeli Galil all spawned indirectly from that original MP43. War is indeed a most curious thing.
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Some bold move by the Ukrainians
Footage of a Ukrainian FPV strike drone rising from a cargo truck and heading towards Russia's Belaya Airbase.
The drone launch and airbase hit were over 4000 km (2500 mi) from Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/XU7bCzV5QJ
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 1, 2025
I once harbored personal aspirations concerning the astronaut program myself. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. NASA photo.
Human beings are social creatures. We are designed by our Creator to crave the company of fellow humans. To be deprived of this mystical stuff is invariably deleterious to the normal psyche.
Our drive for companionship falls along a spectrum. Some folks cannot maintain their sanity if they aren’t among a crowd. Others are happiest with a good book and solitude…for a time. However, true social isolation will, legit, drive a guy crazy.
You can see this in prisons. Even if your mates are all hardened maniacal criminals, everybody despises solitary confinement. A little solitude can be cathartic. A lot is invariably hellish.
Next Level Stuff
Unless you are ridiculously wealthy, you probably will not get to ride into space. Astronaut selection is unimaginably arduous. Curiously, I once aspired to that myself. I applied for the astronaut program right out of flight school and got closer than I had expected.
Had I not cashed in my flight suit in favor of being a husband and father, I might have actually pulled that off eventually. Or not. That’s one of life’s many imponderables.
In retrospect, everything worked out fine. There is arguably no more high-effort/high-payoff profession than serving as an astronaut. However, that’s a pretty tough life.
It’s one thing if you find yourself stuck at Walmart for an hour or even snowbound for a few days. It’s something else entirely to be trapped in space. That experience just touches a primal chord. So much so that more than a few top-flight movies have been made on the very subject. However, sometimes it actually happens for real.
Mankind has maintained a constant presence in space for decades now. Life in the limitless void brings its own unique challenges. NASA photo.
Recent Examples
Astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunny Williams launched up to the International Space Station aboard the new Boeing Starliner back in June of 2024 on what was supposed to be an eight-day mission. Then everything about the Starliner went pear-shaped, and they had to bring the ship back empty. Finally, some 286 days later, a SpaceX Dragon capsule fetched them home. Wilmore and Williams seemed fairly introspective about the experience.
Throughout their time in orbit, Wilmore and Williams were stranded but not forgotten. They could rest easy knowing that the economic and engineering juggernaut that is the United States of Freaking America was going to eventually bring them home. But what if that was not the case?
The Castaway
Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev was born in Leningrad in 1958. His hobbies included skiing, cycling, swimming, aerobatic flying, and amateur radio. He studied Mechanical Engineering and joined NPO Energa in 1981. This was the agency responsible for manned spaceflight in the old Soviet Union.
Over the next several years, he paid his dues. Krikalev played a significant support role in docking with and repairing the out-of-control Salyut 7 space station in 1985. Then, on 26 November 1988, he headed up to the Mir space station for a protracted stay alongside another Russian cosmonaut and a French counterpart. He safely returned to Earth in April of the following year.
Cosmonauts don’t just fall off the turnip truck, and the Soviets wanted to get their money’s worth. On 19 May 1991, Krikalev launched for Mir yet again, this time with a fellow Russian and Brit named Helen Sharman. Sharman came home after a week.
Krikalev and his counterpart, Anatoly Artsebarsky, stuck around per the original mission parameters. When Artsebarsky rotated home, Krikalev volunteered to remain in orbit as Mir’s flight engineer. Then, on 26 December 1991, the Soviet Union imploded under its own weight. The nation that had fired Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev into space no longer existed. He was stuck.
Like most things, a little bit of space is probably pretty cool. Too much, however, is another thing entirely. NASA photo.
When Life Gives You Lemons, Flirt with a Girl…
Krikalev made the best of things. He did scads of EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity- aka space walks) and spoke to folks all around the globe via ham radio. One of his radio buddies was Margaret Iaquinto.
Sergei and Margaret spoke daily for more than a year total. They discussed personal issues, politics, and technical stuff. Iaquinto established a digital bulletin board that the Mir crew could use to get unfiltered news about the death of the Soviet Union.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome and the mission landing area were both located in newly independent Kazakhstan. Folks on the ground seemed a bit preoccupied with their own problems to fret about one dude who had already been in space for a long, long time.
After a great deal of chaos, Krikalev finally came home on 25 March. Because of his unique circumstances, he has been rightfully described as the last citizen of the Soviet Union.
The Rest of the Story
That guy just couldn’t get enough. Once the dust settled on the USSR, Sergei Krikalev volunteered to fly on the US space shuttle. On 3 February 1994, Krikalev blasted off yet again, this time as a crewmember on shuttle flight STS-60.
He returned to Earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery eight days later. In December of 1998, he returned to space as part of STS-88 aboard Endeavor to assist in the assembly of the International Space Station. He returned to the station two more times after that.
Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev went to space a total of six times. He spent an aggregate of 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 minutes in orbit. He conducted eight EVAs for a total of 41 hours and 8 minutes floating about in the void. He is number four on the list of space travelers based on total time spent off-planet. The other three are also all cosmonauts.
Thanks to the curious phenomenon of time dilation, Krikalev is 0.02 seconds younger than someone else born at exactly the same time who remained on Earth. He was awarded both the Hero of Russia and the Hero of the Soviet Union for his extensive work in the heavens. Krikalev closed out his extraordinary career in command of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.
Not half bad for a guy who was shipwrecked in space when his country fell to pieces.
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What!! Not another GLOCK!!
