by Jim Dickson
Top, a Russian Baikal .410 single-shot shotgun with Baikal silencer. This is almost noiseless with 2½” shells for shooting snakes in the horse barn without scaring the horses. It is also effective on birds out to 30 yards. Below it is an original Maxim silencer mounted on a Walther .22 rifle designed for use with a silencer. This gun can be switched back and forth between semi-auto and manual operation should the user want the ultimate in quiet from his silencer. Aside from hunting this rig is indispensable in clearing out snakes and rats from the barn without disturbing the livestock.
Imagine what it would be like if the first day of firearms deer season was the same as opening day for archery deer season. No deer alerted to the onset of hunting season by the booming report of the guns. No spooking of the deer every time a hunter fires. No landowners refusing to let you hunt because they don’t want to be startled by gunshots. That’s a promise that widespread hunting with silencers can deliver on.
The increasing problem of herds of wild hogs proliferating around the country has led to the use of night vision devices for hunting them at night where a more successful cull is possible. This normally requires the use of silencers to prevent waking up the farmers who generally want their sleep more than they want those hogs shot.
Hunting with silencers is a normal state of affairs in most of the world where silencers are regarded as being in the same category as an automobile muffler: a device to protect your hearing and prevent disturbing the peace. Indeed there are many places that won’t let you hunt without a silencer on your gun. In the British Isles, Europe, and South Africa there are many landowners who do not want to be disturbed by gunshots that will permit hunting—provided you use a silencer. Even on their own estates it is common to see nattily attired British gentry hunting with silencers so that they do not disturb the neighbors or the wife’s tea party. In South Africa there are areas that combine wildlife photographic safaris with hunting safaris and they do not want the photographic crowd disturbed or frightened by gunfire. So it is hunting with silencers only.
Europeans have had to reconcile hunting with high population density for generations. The best example is boar hunting in the parks in Berlin where the hunter must shoot from a tree stand and all shots must be angled to go immediately into the ground after passing through the boar. In such situations the picnickers and general population would appreciate not being rattled by a gun booming near them.
A coyote killed without disturbing livestock and neighbors thanks to a SilencerCo silencer. (Photo courtesy SilencerCo)
The nonchalant attitude of the European to silencers was demonstrated when a Swiss gunsmith and silencer maker refused to make a silencer for a .45 automatic because “That’s too big a gun to be shooting in your backyard!”
Silencers were tacked onto the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 and have been tarred as “Gangster weapons” ever since in the US, but the truth is that they have never figured into crime use to any degree. If criminals want them they can certainly get them. Silencers are easily made by anyone with a lathe, and the blueprints of many of the better ones are readily available. Home-made makeshift silencers can be as simple as a 2 liter pop bottle taped to the gun muzzle or the old crow hunter’s trick of putting a rubber baby bottle nipple over the muzzle of a .22 rifle. These work for a shot or two quite well. A potato with a hole bored through the middle for the bullet to go through even works after a fashion for one shot. There are many designs for disposable silencers that have been published. Moving on up, an empty hand held propane cylinder for a blowtorch can be threaded to the muzzle of an AK47 or AR15 and a hole drilled in the base for the bullet to exit through for a surprisingly effective silencer. In spite of all this availability you don’t see any significant use of silencers by criminals either here or abroad.
The idea of regulating silencers for .22s became ridiculous with the introduction of CCI’s Quiet-.22 ammo. This ammo provides lower noise levels from rifles and pistols than most silencers can provide with standard velocity ammo. More on this innovative ammo later.
The popular British silenced 20-gauge over and under shotgun. This is a favorite among British shooters who need a quiet shotgun for places that won’t permit hunting without a silencer.
There are compelling reasons for using a silencer when hunting. Protecting your ears from hearing damage is the most obvious. Most people do not wear hearing protection when they are hunting because they want to hear the noise the game makes. All of my old friends had hearing aids from the cumulative effect of so much firing without protection. Hearing loss is a major health issue in this country with the US veterans claims alone for 2014 totaling $2.26 billion. The danger to children learning to shoot cannot be discounted. To paraphrase a liberal mantra, “Legalize silencers for the children’s sake!” Aside from permanent hearing loss the noise of a firearm is a big part of what causes many people to flinch.
What about your dog? Silencers are increasingly being fitted to shotguns and are proving very successful in preventing deafness in older gun dogs. Indeed the argument can be made that hunting over a dog without a silencer constitutes cruelty to animals, considering how many gun dogs lose their hearing from gunshot noise damage over the years.
Obviously the silencer haters could care less about hearing damage to adults, children, or animals. Their mindless hatred of anything related to weapons makes them want the innocent to be hurt so that it may discourage others from the manly pursuits of arms. They cry “If it can save one life we must pass this anti-gun law!” yet the National Firearms Act has cost America the lives of thousands of its soldiers in the wars since it was enacted in 1934. Silencers make it hard for you to tell where a gunshot came from. That saves lives in combat. Since the public became ignorant of the virtues of a silencer after the National Firearms Act effectively removed them from the market. They didn’t know the protection they were missing in combat and could not clamor for the issue of silencers. By the same token the NFA’s removal of machineguns from the market insured that no recruit would know how to control one in full automatic fire and the government is certainly not going to expend the necessary amount of ammo to teach that. Since they did not know the difference between a controllable machinegun and an uncontrollable one there was no clamor when guns that the average soldier could not control on full auto fire were adopted and issued. That has meant more dead young men by the thousands in every war since 1934 courtesy of the National Firearms Act.
A close-up shot of the rare original Maxim offset silencer mounted on the Walther .22. The Maxim silencer is unsurpassed for quietness even today.
Due to the silencer’s effect on dampening the harmonic vibration of the barrel when firing silencers are a great accuracy increaser. You can do everything possible to accurize a gun and still see an improvement in accuracy when you mount a silencer.
Recoil reduction is something silencers do better than anything else. A good silencer can reduce felt recoil up to 75%. That’s because a silencer is the world’s best muzzle brake. While a conventional muzzle brake works by directing some of the muzzle blast back at your ears where it can deafen you, a silencer has all the muzzle blast pushing forward against its baffles, effectively counteracting most of the recoil forces. The result is 8 year old children and lightly built women can easily shoot a .30-06 comfortably. In the past they have been saddled with guns chosen for their lack of recoil which often also means lack of killing power. Watching a wounded animal escape to die a lingering death is a sure way to sour them on hunting. Shooting an effective caliber like the .30-06 with no discomfort helps insure that they have a good hunting experience and keep returning to hunting.
This also means that men can easily shoot heavier more effective calibers like the .375 H&H Magnum and the .338 Lapua. Putting one on elephant rifles like the .458 Winchester magnum or the 500 Jeffrey enables anyone to handle them and what’s more shoot them faster for follow up shots. When faced with a charging elephant, Cape buffalo, or grizzly that suddenly seems very, very important. The fact that a silencer makes it hard to tell where the shot came from can be extremely important when culling elephants or anytime you are having to deal with a herd that may turn on you when one of their members is shot.
Silencers work by slowing the exploding gunpowder gasses down to subsonic levels so that they no longer have a sonic boom for this is all that the report of a gun is. Of course there is always the gas in line with the bore and bullet so no silencer is ever as quiet as the ones depicted in the movies and for best results you need a bullet that is subsonic as well. That way you don’t have the projectile making its own sonic boom as it flies downrange.
Thanks to the fact that silencers are by far the world’s most efficient brakes, even small children can fire high-powered, man-sized rifles.
The inspiration for the first silencer was Hiram Maxim’s toilet. As he watched the water swirl round as it flushed he realized that if he could swirl the expanding gunpowder gasses around like that he could slow them down to subsonic levels. He accomplished this with a series of baffles inside a tube allowing for the powder gasses to fully expand and then diverting them about to slow them down. Thus the famed Maxim silencer was born. To this day no one has made a better one.
In WW2 the OSS had silencers that used rolled wire screen and/or screen wire discs with a hole stamped out of the middle so that the bullet could just barely pass through. These were efficient until they were put on submachineguns where the intense heat of full auto firing quickly burned up the screens. Baffles are needed for full auto weapons.
In the 1970’s Mitch WerBell developed the Sionics silencer. The ones fitted to the Ingram SMGs featured an expansion chamber filled with shoe grommets, 2 sets of spiral baffles with the first twisting the opposite direction from the second, and an expansion chamber at the muzzle equipped with a “Wipe” consisting of a ¼” thick disk of Ecushnet E310 polyurethane. The wipe was intended to close back to below bore size after the bullet passed through thereby further slowing the escape of the gunpowder gasses. The wipes’ only problem was that they do need frequent replacement.
Since then there have been a host of new designs but they all work on the same principle, slow down the gasses to the point that they no longer make the sonic boom.
The new CCI Quiet-.22 ammo works by using a light load that enables the volumetric capacity of the primer and powder gasses to be quickly reached inside the bore allowing the speed of the gas to then drop to subsonic levels as it follows the subsonic bullet down the barrel. This works so well that this ammo is quieter than most silencers using normal ammo. There is 75% less perceived noise than a conventional .22. Best of all, it can be bought over the counter like any other .22 cartridges. CCI has found a legal way to get around the NFA. It comes in two versions, a segmented hollow point that breaks into 3 pieces on impact and a lead round nose. Both shoot a 40-grain bullet at 710 FPS. Penetration in ballistic gelatin is 5” for the HP and 11” for the lead RN. The segmented hollowpoint has proved a perfect trapline round dispatching coyotes and hogs cleanly and humanely. Georgia trapper Marty Adams who normally traps about 40 coyotes a week has successfully used this on trapped coyotes and even trapped hogs weighing over 300 pounds. The lead RN has not proved to be a humane killer with head shots though and should only be used for practice.
Famed white hunter and British “Best Quality” gunmaker Giles Whittome firing his original Maxim offset silencer on a Walther .22 specifically designed for use with a silencer. This .22 can be used as a semi-auto or a manually operated gun for maximum quietness, if desired.
Sound is measured in decibels and an increase of 10 decibels means the sound is 10 times louder. Hearing damage begins with long term exposure to 85 decibels. OSHA regulations allow a worker no more than one 130 decibel noise per 24 hours and has 140 decibels as the safety cut-off for impulse noise. Normal speech is 60 decibels, a vacuum cleaner is 70 decibels, a scream is 80 decibels, a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun is in the high 90’s, high powered .177 and .22 air rifles are 115 decibels, chainsaws, firecrackers, and sirens run from 100 to 140 decibels. A CCI standard velocity .22 fired from a 3½” barrel is 160.7 decibels but a good silencer can reduce that to as low as 117.7 decibels. The CCI Quiet-.22 ammo has 74 decibels from a 6” barrel and 68 decibels from a standard rifle barrel. The famed British WW2 DeLisle-silenced carbine reduced the .45ACP down to 85.5 decibels.
To legally own a silencer in the US one must pay a $200 transfer tax to the ATF, be fingerprinted like a common criminal, and have the top law enforcement officer in the purchaser’s county approve the sale. Many anti-gun officers categorically refuse to do that for anyone. As long as silencers are on the NFA list of weapons many will refuse to own them out of fear of trigger happy cops and SWAT teams overreacting to reports of an NFA weapon. Fear of ATF abusing their power makes many want to avoid having anything to do with them. Indeed many put fear of ATF excesses at the top of the list of their reasons for not owning a silencer. For these reasons it is imperative that silencers be taken off the NFA and any other laws regulating them so that they can take their rightful place as mufflers for guns, protecting hearing and preventing disturbance of the peace.
