“Silencers” Are Anything But Silent

Hollywood tropes are recurring themes, clichés, or storytelling shortcuts that filmmakers often use to quickly convey ideas or create drama. Here are some of the most common and recognizable Hollywood tropes, including the over-the-top ones like exploding cars:

• Cars explode from anything – A fender bender? Boom. Go off a cliff? Mushroom cloud.
• Unlimited ammo – Heroes rarely reload, even after hundreds of shots.
• One-shot kills for heroes, grazing shots for villains – Good guys shoot like snipers, bad guys like stormtroopers.
• Walking away from explosions – In slow motion, of course. Never flinch, never look back.
• Diving through windows – Glass is somehow soft and non-lethal.
• Gunshot knocks people off their feet – As if bullets have the force of a wrecking ball.
• Jumping away from a fireball mid-air – Usually in perfect heroic form.
• Villains explain their whole plan – Right before failing to kill the hero.

One of the most inaccurate Hollywood tropes is how silencers supposedly make guns “sleeping-chihuahua SBD” quiet. It makes for a great scene, sure — the hero and the bad guy trading shots in a crowded plaza, firing from under their coats, and somehow nobody hears a thing. Meanwhile, in the real world, even a suppressed gun still sounds like a gun. It’s not silent — it’s just less likely to blow out your eardrums. And unlike your dog’s tactical toot, you’ll definitely hear it… but at least it won’t smell nearly as bad.

But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Yes, officially the patent registered for these devices calls them “silencers” but in the gun world they are more frequently referred to as “Suppressors”. However, calling them a “Muffler” would be very accurate as well. Silencers work almost exactly like car mufflers. They use baffles to create chambers that cause the noise to cancel itself out. But we don’t go around calling our car mufflers “silencers”, do we?

We have all had that neighbor that is working on their car every single weekend. You know the one, the guy with the beat up Camaro that is always talking about how someday it is going to dominate at the track and on the street. He loves to fire it up every weekend with open headers (no mufflers) and you can hear it from down the street. It is loud, obnoxious and against the law for him to drive without the mufflers on the street.

Well, Silencers are exactly the same. Put a muffler on that car and it is still loud, but it is not ear shattering loud. You will notice the pit crews at the race tracks are all wearing hearing protection because the cars they are racing do not have mufflers. But when they get in their V8 powered car that they drive home, they do not need the hearing protection any more. The car is still loud, but it is not unsafe for our hearing.

If Hollywood invented mufflers the cars they put them on would be as quiet as a Tesla, even though they had the massive V-8 engine under the hood. The car would just drive away at full throttle with just the low noise of the tires on the road.

Congress is currently debating a bill that would remove suppressors (Silencers) from the NFA Act of 1934. Opposition to this bill believes that doing so would result in a massive increase in crimes that use them and would make them undetectable somehow. The truth is, the people arguing against this bill don’t actually understand how these devices work – basing their knowledge on the Hollywood trope. I sure hope they don’t get in a car accident on the way home and their car blows up. If that were the case, cars would likely be outlawed and banned due to the very unsafe nature of them.

In other parts of the world, ironically places that do not have the same gun rights enshrined in their constitution or laws that the US has can walk into a store and purchase a suppressor just like they would any other hearing protection. In fact, it is considered bad manners to shoot without a suppressor. Gun shots are very loud, suppressed gunshots are still loud, but not nearly as loud and not dangerous like un-suppressed gun fire.

We need to remove silencers from the NFA. Having to pay an additional $200 tax stamp and go through an extended background check does not make them any less dangerous or any more silent. Suppressors don’t make guns silent — they just make them safer. In truth, a suppressor doesn’t make a gun whisper. It just keeps it from shouting.