Why are Republicans more likely to suffer hearing loss?

Is it guns?
Edit: It's guns.
- I work with a few pro 2nd people and also a few ammosexuals. Guns in general, perhaps, but more so IMHO, it's an unwillingness to use basic safety and protection. Idiots probably think tinnitus is manly.
  
  I used to sell guns as part of my retail job, and because of the kind of store it was we got plenty of people from all over the political spectrum, and most of them I knew well enough know the majority had no moral qualms with firearms.
  It was always a certain political view that were the ones most vocal about their gun ownership, and how earpro was for pussies.
  Well I guess I'm soft and smooth, because I will happily use everything in my PPE arsenal to make sure everyone around me is as safe as possible at all times. As everyone should when firearms are involved.
  Plugs, muffs, I like to use a rubber pad just because the impulse of the shots aren't great for your joints and I'm getting to the age where my joints are starting to feel ways about stuff. Legally acquired sound suppression.
  Shooting glasses that cover the sides too. I had a 22lr casing bounce off the range wall and hit me in the side of the eyelid because the glasses I had on didn't wrap around the sides.
  Safety is about more than the "basic rules of gun safety" that every person who touches a gun should know.
  The fact that some people genuinely think that wearing something to keep themselves from going deaf makes them "weak" just makes me wonder how such people can figure out how to breathe and walk at the same time, let alone vote.
  
  To be fair, the most effective form of hearing protection is strictly regulated at the federal level.
  Ear protection helps, but it is not completely effective. Earplugs and earmuffs together help, but too much of the noise reaches the cochlea via bone conduction. The only way to mitigate this is with what the law calls a "silencer" or "firearm muffler" and the gun community refers to as a "suppressor".
- No no no, it's tone deaf

I like guns, a lot. I own more guns than the typical gun owner. Given that I compete when I can--I have a match this weekend with a projected round count of 450, between rifle and pistol--I shoot more than about 99% of all gun owners.
I never shoot without ear protection. When I'm near people that are shooting rifles, I prefer to have both ear plugs and electronic ear muffs (because even with ear muffs, a gun shot is LOUD). Yeah, I've got hearing damage, but that's because I was stupid and went to a shit ton of punk, industrial, and metal shows without hearing protection before I wised up in my 30s and started wearing ear protection to concerts. (I highly recommend Etymotic high-fidelity ear plugs; they reduce sound more evenly than foam earplugs, so you don't end up having the earplugs kill all the treble and mid without touching the bass. The sound is much, much cleaner than with foam ear plugs.)
I will probably start buying silencers once I can, because they're just too useful at preserving your hearing if you're a high-volume shooter.
And, BTW - there's no record of why silencers were put in the NFA of 1934. There apparently wasn't any debate about it. We know that all handguns were originally going to be in the NFA, and short-barrel rifles and shotguns were included to prevent people from using that as a work-around for a handgun ban. But handguns were removed from the final version, which made SBRs and SBSs orphans in the bill. The best guess about silencers is that they were banned to make it a little easier for game wardens to detect poachers, since 1934 was the height of the Great Depression, and poaching was a common way for very poor people to feed themselves.
- 3M earplugs are fine for blocking noise in general. But all foam ear plugs block more noise at the treble and mid ranges better than in the bass. For live music, that means that the sound will end up being very muddy, with way too much drum and bass, and the vocals, lead, and rhythm guitar will be mostly gone. Etymotic is specifically good for audio settings; you're getting less overall noise reduction, but it's keeping the sound more clear.
  I think that bass in particular is hard to block because at least some of the sound it through conduction rather than air movement in your ear canal.

Kinda explains things when even mild hearing loss doubles your risk of dementia.
- Not sure we can really say that one causes the other, though

Congress should've passed the Hearing Protection Act.