Glock 17 Suppressed - AUSTIN, Texas - Let's get this out of the way right now: Movies and TV always get the wrong silencers. The way suppressors are used on screen - often attached to the barrel of an automatic rifle or assault rifle or a large-caliber pistol, mowing down baddies while other, blissfully oblivious baddies quietly sip their tea at the end of the hall - is simple not possible. Silencers, which are more accurately (and accurately) called "silencers", do not work
That's first-hand information after several hours at the range with Jason Schäuble of SilencerCo, where we fired several hundred rounds of various sizes and shapes through a wide assortment of different firearms. With the exception of small caliber ammunition fired from carefully designed weapons, oppressors do not come close to being quiet. They are damn loud.
Glock 17 Suppressed
Later again. That's another thing that Hollywood gets completely wrong. Heroes regularly fire hundreds of rounds in a firefight without earplugs and can hold a conversation right after. Anyone who has fired a gun before can tell you that without hearing protection it doesn't take more than a few shots at close range to temporarily deafen you - guns really are that loud.
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Companies that manufacture and sell silencers therefore have an uphill battle. They work against the popular perception that these products are assassination tools best suited for stealthily killing people, and that there are few reasons other than "covert assassination" or a possible "takeover of Nakatomi Plaza" that one would need to own one . But after a few hours of shooting, we got the impression that suppressors are actually useful even for casual gun owners. Even if you're not a gun fan at all, the technology involved in stealing much of the gun report noise is fascinating.
Because of that technology, we have arrived in the range. This is obviously not "Guns Technica," and we don't often look to gun advancements to cover it. However, the actual opportunity for the oppressors to try a dozen different weapons to see how they worked was too much to resist. So we went to Austin and met Schäuble who brought a real set of SilencerCo manufactured firearms and suppressors to walk us through how it all works.
If Jason Schäuble's name sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it's not the first time Ars has run into him. Schäuble is the former CEO of TrackingPoint, a company that makes highly accurate (and very expensive) Linux-powered firearms. We recently wrote about TrackingPoint back in August when we got some hands-on time with the company's pre-production AR-15 carbine. We said at the time that Schäuble had left the company a few months before, but we did not say where.
Turns out he jumped town to SilencerCo, working at the company's Utah branch in Austin as its chief revenue officer. His past experience at Remington and Advanced Armament Corporation (not to mention his active duty in the Marine Corps) seems to have prepared him well for the job. When we arrived at the Best of the West Range - the same range where we shot with the TrackingPoint - Schäuble had already set up a long table with firearms and suppressors.
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SilencerCo has turned out to be a major player in a seemingly off-the-radar industry. Although it employs only 125 people, the company has about 40 percent of the home muffler market - so they are responsible for a large part of the more than 100,000 mufflers purchased annually in the United States. The company has been selling silencers since 2009 and the market is growing. According to marketing materials provided by SilencerCo, silencer sales in the United States are growing at a rate of about 20 percent annually. For 2014, SilencerCo expects to sell approximately 40,000 devices to customers ranging from private individuals to local law enforcement to the military.
SilencerCo was originally founded by two fellows named Josh Waldron and Jonathan Schultz - a photographer and an audio engineer. The pair were frustrated with both the muffler buying process and what they felt was a lack of customer service from existing muffler manufacturers (so they decided to start their own company in an attempt to do better). One of the first products the duo designed and built was the Osprey muffler - a non-round "eccentric" muffler that stood out in its line of typical cylindrical mufflers. "Eccentric" here means that the hole through which the bullet passes does not pass through the center of the silencer. SilencerCo made this choice because most barrel suppressors actually stick out past the front sight of the gun, obscuring it and making it difficult to aim effectively. The Osprey's design avoids this by placing most of its hoses below the port so the gun sight is usable.
Enlarge / An eccentric Osprey muffler, above, versus traditional round octane, below. The Osprey's shape keeps it out of the way of a gun.
Lee Hutchinson Lee is a senior technology editor at Ars, overseeing gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows things about enterprise storage, security and human spaceflight. Lee is based in Houston, Texas.
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