In Defense of Suppressors
People accuse gun owners of never wanting to compromise, but the thing is we have been compromising for decades one small step at a time. Of the big laws and regulations on firearms, one towers as the most major, most encompassing, and most restricting.
Think back to the AR-15 article and the section about assault rifles. An assault rifle is a machine gun; an automatic weapon where one trigger instance nets more than one cartridge being chambered and fired. I.e.; one trigger pull gives you multiple bullets downrange. Among other things, machine guns were banned in the National Firearms Act of 1934. Other items banned include short barreled rifles, short barreled shotguns, suppressors, and “other weapons” like cane-guns and umbrella-guns. I’d like to focus on suppressors in particular, as I view the regulation of suppressors to be the most infringing and ridiculous.
A suppressor or silencer is a muzzle device designed to reduce the audible noise a gunshot makes by quelling the sound of the gunpowder’s ignition; tl;dr, it quiets the explosion. Baffles and chambers in the suppressor slow down the escaping gases and dissipate the shockwave, reducing the sound. Although Hiram Maxim’s original patent from 1909 calls the device a silencer, the gun community more frequently calls them suppressors. This is due to the incorrect but popular belief that the device enables firearms to be fired so quietly that a murder could take place without anyone knowing, even if witnesses are quite close. This fallacy is solely crafted by Hollywood and video games, but is used as a lever by gun control advocates and portrayed as fact.
Independent firearms blog AmmunitionToGo.com conducted a detailed test of suppressors. An unsuppressed carbine length .223 will ring the bell to the tune of 170 decibels. A suppressor will bring that down to around 135. For context, a train horn blowing full song puts out between 96-110 decibels. So if a train is blasting its call, you’ll still hear that suppressed .223 louder.
If you want a gun to shoot like the movies, you have to shoot a suppressed bolt-action rifle with subsonic ammunition. Subsonic ammunition, as the name implies, will not create the loud crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it’s traveling below 1,100 FPS. The bolt-action part is also important, because the cycling of a bolt or slide in a semi-automatic weapon would be louder than the gunshot with suppressed subsonic. With a bolt action weapon, the only other sound would be a click as the firing pin strikes the primer. The idea that regular ammunition and a semi-auto pistol will shoot like Mission Impossible is crazy, but the idea that people are getting their firearms “knowledge” from film is even crazier.
Now to say that suppressors have been outlawed is actually false by technicality. In addition to short-barreled rifles and fully automatic weaponry predating 1986, suppressors can be obtained through a federal form, registration, and an additional tax stamp. That’s right, SBRs, full autos, and suppressors are too dangerous for civilian usage, unless you slide $200 their way; then it’s fine. How this doesn’t fit the definition of extortion (or bribery at minimum) is beyond me, especially because suppressors should be considered safety devices. Hiram Maxim’s original patent for the firearm suppressor was simultaneously used in his patent for the automobile muffler. To us in the gun community, suppressors should be thought of in the same vein as safety glasses and ear plugs; just a regular part of safety.
It should be interesting to note that the United Kingdom has a much heftier usage of suppressors versus the U.S. Over there, the culture of suppressors is of not disturbing the land you’re hunting on. So to the UK, it’s not just a safety thing, it’s a common decency thing. It’s interesting that even the UK, which has overwhelmingly oppressive gun laws, still understands the importance of suppressors.