We’ve heard of the debate over legalizing “silencers” — the left’s shorthand for noise suppressors — on firearms. But on rattlesnakes? Well, I didn’t even know such a thing existed.

Leave it to an enterprising Texan, Ryan Felton Sauter, to create such a thing. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Sauter was having a kerfuffle with his neighbor in an RV park in rural Caldwell County.

So, he found a rattlesnake, bit off its tail so that his neighbor couldn’t hear it coming and then released it in his RV. Because clearly that’s how you solve your problems.

“An arrest affidavit doesn’t say what sparked the verbal altercation between Sauter and his neighbor, Keith Monroe, who lives in one of the RVs along FM 1854 in Dale, about 40 minutes southeast of Austin,” the American-Statesman notes.

However, at some point during the June 17 argument, Sauter returned to his RV to get his silent biological weapon.

Monroe asked Sauter why he was going back to his RV.

“He said, ‘You’ll see why,’” Monroe recalled.

When Monroe went back inside his RV, he found the three-foot snake curled up on the driver’s side of the home.

“I freaked out,” Monroe said. “I couldn’t believe this happened.”

Monroe used a machete to kill the beast, and given the circumstances, police came out to investigate. “Deputies observed that the snake’s rattles had been removed,” an affidavit noted.

KTRK-TV reported Sauter later confessed to investigators he’d bit off the rattle on his own so that it couldn’t be heard by Monroe. As of Friday, Sauter was still in Caldwell County Jail on charges of deadly conduct and criminal trespass of a habitation.

Bail is set at $7,500 for each charge; I don’t want to buy into stereotypes here, but I get the feeling the kind of guy who allegedly would bite the tail off a rattlesnake to use it as a weapon is probably going to be staying there for a while.

“I haven’t seen or heard anything like that since the old cowboy days. They used to throw a snake in the room with the two gamblers and whoever got bit won,” Monroe said.

Of course, I can’t wait for Michael Bloomberg to travel to Texas and start pontificating about the scourge of assault rattlesnakes. These aren’t the kind of rattlesnakes that the founders envisioned when they wrote the Constitution, after all.

Does nature really need rattlesnakes? And what about even more dangerous assault serpents like the cottonmouth and coral snake? This is to say nothing of spiders and scorpions, which can also be easily concealed.

It’s time to turn them all in, Mother Nature. My right to stay alive is more important than your right to keep venomous creatures.

www.westernjournal.com/ct/trailer-argument-leads-to-man-using-modif...