Gun Owners: Buy A Silencer

The hype is real, suppressed shooting is safer, and more enjoyable for everyone

It’s the purpose of firearms associations to radicalize young men into voting against their own financial interests, something they achieve by blocking regulatory progress, then pointing to the nonsensical, frustrating mess they themselves help create as evidence that politics is broken. So it’s rare to see genuine, effective change occur that provides tangible benefits for gun owners. But change has just occurred. Thanks to two unlikely sources—the ATF, and the One Big Beautiful Bill act—firearm suppressors are now significantly easier to buy and much more affordable. Let me explain why everyone wins here.

What’s A Silencer?

Excuse me, suppressor. As makers of these devices have worked to expand their adoption, they’ve coined that politically correct term. And while “suppressor” much more accurately describes what these steel, aluminum, or titanium cans actually do, “silencer” remains the historically accurate term.

The silencer was invented in 1902 by Hiram Percy Maxim, the son of Hiram Stevens Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim gun, and the nephew of Hudson Maxim, the inventor of smokeless gun powder. He’d actually set out to and successfully created a device for muffling the sound produced by automobile engines, but through those family ties realized a muffler could be equally applicable to reducing the noise produced by firearms.

Just like the muffler on your car, a silencer captures gasses created by combustion and passes them through a series of baffles where they’re slowed and cooled, reducing the sound they produce as they exit the barrel.

Picture an inflated balloon. If you pop that balloon, all the air in it escapes at once, producing a loud noise. If you instead open that balloon’s valve allowing air to escape over the period of a second or two, the noise is greatly reduced.

Noise levels produced by firearms vary, but firing a typical hunting rifle unsuppressed will produce 140 to 170 decibels. A silencer is capable of reducing that by 20 to 30 dB, about the same level of noise reduction provided by a good set of earmuffs.

By employing a suppressor, you protect not only your own hearing and that of those around you, but you also reduce the noise pollution created by gunfire.

A brochure for the original silencer.

Are Silencer’s Silent?

When you pull the trigger, a firing pin strikes the primer, setting off a small explosive charge housed in the base of the cartridge, that ignites the gunpowder contained in the cartridge, which expands rapidly, forcing the bullet down the barrel.

A silencer reduces noise caused by the rapid expansion of of those combustion gases as they exit the barrel.

Most normal bullets begin their journey away from the barrel at speeds exceeding the speed of sound, and create a sonic boom as a result. A silencer does nothing to mitigate this noise.

Firearms can cycle manually, or by employing the force generated by combustion, automatically. Manually ejecting and chambering a round is a relatively slow process that produces little noise, and the shooter can choose when to create that noise. Automatic operation includes the noise created by rapidly cycling the bolt and associated components, and takes place rapidly after the gun is fired, producing a surprising amount of noise.

Silencers significantly reduce the amount of noise produced by firearms, they do not eliminate that noise.

Teddy Roosevelt’s silenced Winchester.

Why Are Silencer’s Controversial?

I’m reminded here of the switchblade knife. Those were banned by federal law amid widespread panic over urban street gangs following the success of “West Side Story” on Broadway. They’re no more dangerous than any other knife, but facing pressure from white suburban voters to do something about the threat posed by Puerto Rican immigrants and their snazzy tap dancing skills, Congress passed the Switchblade Knife act of 1958.

The ability to shoot without damaging your hearing or bothering other people was originally as non-controversial as it sounds. Teddy Roosevelt was a fan, using one on his Winchester 1894.

“Father favored the silencer for early morning hunting expeditions to eliminate varmints around Sagamore Hill,” his son Archie is quoted as saying. “He felt it best not to wake the neighbors.”

Then, during the 1920s and ‘30s, Prohibition gave rise to the gangster. Newsreel footage chronicled crimes committed by people like Al Capone, frequently wielding Thompson submachine guns. The images are burned into popular imagination to this day.

Facing pressure to do something about Italian immigrants and their Tommy guns, politicians set out to pass the first federal gun law.

“We can never be free from the menace of promiscuous killings until the possession of firearms is everywhere restricted to persons of known character,” Senator Royal Copeland stated in 1933. “To this end I shall press my bill for passage through the United States Senate.”

The result was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which set out to ban a slew of weapons popularly associated with gang violence, but due to the 2nd Amendment was only able to push some types into a separate category requiring registration and the payment of a federal tax upon purchase.

For silencers, that tax was set at $200, an number that has remained the same, but when converted from 1934 to 2025 dollars represented $4,887—an intentional effort to make purchasing one prohibitively expensive.

That worked, and silencers passed out of popular use and into the popular imagination through films, TV, comic books, and cheesy British spy novels. As silencers become less and less common in actual use, people forgot how they worked and instead assumed the way they were represented in media—a literally silent firearm—was reality.

Gun Owners Are Victims Of The Culture War

In1978, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tried to force gun dealers to report sales, records the ATF would then maintain in a database in order to make it simple to track firearms ownership by serial number, and use that information to fight crime.

The National Rifle Association, which had been forcibly taken over by a convicted murderer deadset on transforming it into a political weapon the previous year, revolted.

(If you’re curious about this history, which is fascinating, I recommend watching HBO’s “The Price of Freedom” documentary. Bill Clinton co-stars in it alongside yours truly.)

The NRA successfully lobbied Congress to reduce the ATF’s budget by the $5 million it was requesting to create that database, and went on to insert a rider in every single budget bill from 1979 through 2011 preventing the “consolidation or centralization,” of records, then made that prohibition permanent in 2012. The agency was stuck in the past, maintaining paper records, and processing paper forms.

And while this measure was effective at preventing the ATF from building a searchable database, it also made the process of conducting silencer registrations through the NFA tax stamp process nearly impossible.

Before last year, if you wanted to buy a silencer, you needed to visit a gun dealer to purchase it, fill out paperwork, submit photographs and fingerprints, pay that $200 tax, then wait for a period often measured in years while the ATF conducted a background check ahead of approving the transaction. That process took place entirely using physical paperwork (even though FBI criminal records are maintained in a digital database), and was often measured in years.

In 2022, after a decade of being managed by largely powerless acting directors, a Democrat-led Senate finally voted to confirm a director for the agency. Steve Dettelbach implemented an electronic process for submitting NFA paperwork, but left that with the glacial processing timelines of the past. Following political pressure, the person managing NFA applications was replaced, and new processes were implemented that allowed anyone without flags in the FBI database to move quickly through the registration process. Wait times fell to a matter of days, sometimes even hours.

But to many, it still makes no sense that a safety device—one which benefits both shooters and non-shooters alike—should remain subject to red tape that most firearms themselves are not.

That’s something gun store owner Andrew Clyde, a Republican who represents Georgia’s 9th District in the House of Representatives, was aware of as his party began assembling this year’s budget reconciliation package. As we have all painfully learned, that process allows a party to ram legislative priorities through the Senate on a simple majority vote, avoiding the filibuster. But, that process is supposed to apply budgets only, rather than general legislative measures.

“Burdensome regulations and unconstitutional taxes shouldn’t stand in the way of protecting American gun owners’ hearing,” Clyde states.

Clyde introduced an amendment that would have exempted silencers from NFA approval entirely, and removed the $200 tax applied to them. The Senate’s Parliamentarian ruled reconciliation couldn’t do the former, but did apply to the latter. As of January 1, 2026, silencers will no longer be subject to federal taxation.

Silencers In Action

Taking advantage of the dramatically shorter approval times, I asked Nosler to send over an SR-30K late last year. Once it’d arrived at my gun store, and I visited to fill out the (now electronic) paperwork in January, approval took less than 48 hours.

I chose that device because Nosler makes incredibly high quality ammunition, firearms, and now silencers, and the SR-30K (K is short for the German word for “short”) is their shortest, lightest option at just 5.8 inches and 7.2 ounces. I’m passionate about carrying my rifles on long, arduous hikes and calling that “hunting,” and wanted the ability to add the least amount of additional weight and length to the end of my barrels, while still benefiting from a significant reduction in noise. Those dimensions do involve a compromise—while the K-can’s 21dB reduction is still significant, it’s behind the 25 to 30dB figures offered by the brand’s other silencers.

One feature of silencers is that they work on any firearm from the caliber they’re designed for, on down. So you can purchase a single silencer to work across multiple rifles. A 30-caliber design, I’m able to twist the K-can onto my .300 Winchester Magnum, my .308, my 6.5 Creedmoor, my .243, my .223, my .22…you get the idea.

The device then reduces the noise produced by firing any of those by about 21dB. By capturing and slowing combustion gases as they escape the barrel, silencers also work to reduce recoil. Adding the K-can to any of my rifles turns the experience from one that’s uncomfortable even while wearing earmuffs over foam earplugs into one that’s positively pleasant while wearing foam earplugs alone.

I’ve tried measuring the actual reduction, but smartphone apps that claim to measure decibels don’t seem capable of accurately recording the short, sharp report made by firearms. Plenty of people have conducted tests using higher quality equipment that you can watch on YouTube.

Beyond the established quantitative benefits, yesterday I found an ideal opportunity to test the qualitative benefits provided by silencers. We’ve had friends visiting from Canada for the last two weeks, and one of them is working to take up hunting, but has never before had an opportunity to actually shoot a gun. They asked me to teach them, and that turned into an entire day out for a group of six.

An amazing result for a first-time shooter. Silencers reduce intimidation while fostering comfort.

Combined with the heavier stock I’ve fitted to my 6.5 Creedmoor, the Nosler silencer almost entirely eliminates recoil. And, by also shifting the noise from a loud bang into a muffled thump that’s a full four times quieter, that transforms the experience of shooting it from one that’s violent into one that’s entirely friendly. By simply resting the rifle on a sandbag, all of that combined to allow a first-time shooter to stack the first 10 rounds they’d ever fired into a two-inch group. That’s an extraordinary result, and one boosted by (audible) cheers from the rest of us, as we stood 20 yards away while wearing no hearing protection at all.

This experienced shooter is also enjoying the benefits. After decades of shooting guns, riding motorcycles, and driving fast cars I suffer from tinnitus, something that’s often made temporarily worse after experiencing loud sounds like gunshots. But writing this 24 hours after an entire afternoon spent observing hundreds of rounds being fired at close range, while wearing only foam ear plugs, I have no additional ringing in my ears.

And people who didn’t decide to go shooting with us yesterday also benefited. As is time-honored American tradition, we visited public lands to enjoy an afternoon of free shooting. And other people were enjoying that area of public lands too, camping, hiking and off-roading nearby. But simply walking a couple of hundred yards behind the safe shooting station I’d set up in front of a dirt berm was enough to leave the sound of our activity behind entirely. That’s to say, thanks to the Nosler silencer, we didn’t bother anyone else at all.

And if you shoot too, you can take advantage of all these same benefits. Wait until January 1 to skip the $200 tax if you want, but silencers are now available to everyone, with easy, quick approval, at any local gun store. That should be cause for quiet celebration.

Top photo: My wife Virginia is a better shot than I am.

Want to do something to fight attempts to steal public land, dismantle national parks, and destroy the environment? Want to go further outdoors while better enjoying the experience? Upgrading to a paid subscription helps independent journalism change minds, and buys personal access to Wes, who will use his experience and his extensive network of subject matter experts to guide your gear purchases, help plan your trips, and save you money. You can read more about what Wes is doing on Substack at this link.