When I bring my gun to the library do I need to bring my silencer? The Vent.
I was driving home, listening to announcers bloviate on 680 The Fan about upcoming football games when a commercial for a gun store came on telling listeners they had “all your silencer needs.”
Huh? I didn’t know I, or anyone else, had such a necessity. I always assumed those were the tools of grim fellows with bent noses dressed in pinstripe suits. I’m from Chicago. Mafia chief Sam Giancana got whacked with a silencer-equipped pistol.
The Dixie Mafia used them too. A favorite was a foam-filled tin can taped to the barrel of a .22 pistol. Might not have been pretty, but it got the job done.
Earlier this year, Georgia’s legislature, in its wisdom and eternal deference to the gun lobby, OK’d silencers for hunting. Always thought that was a bit odd, but admittedly, I’m a city guy, so what do I know about killing deer? (Other than I hit one with a Corolla wagon at 80 mph.)
I suppose nothing gets the attention of a deer like the peal of a rifle. Hikers, too, for that matter.
I called Big Woods Goods near Canton, the store with all my silencer needs, and was told to come in the next morning because it was the Christmas rush and business increases as the day goes on.
Bill Miller, owner of Big Woods Goods near Canton, smiled and admitted Mafia and espionage movies have created a standard of public perception for silencers.
“But when I think of silencers, I think of this,” he said, walking across the showroom to grab a pair of shooting range earmuffs.
The store’s silencer display case had perhaps 20 models, ranging in price from $249 to $999. Often, the silencer is more expensive than the firearm it’s quieting.
Silencers, according to several Web sites maintained by peddlers and aficionados, are legal in 39 states and can be used for hunting in most of those.
‘More law-abiding’
Miller, a former electrician and salesman from Ohio, said gun owners buying them must fill out a fair amount of paperwork that includes a background check and a $200 federal tax stamp. The process takes five to nine months, so those wanting to get a stocking stuffer need to be thinking Christmas 2015.
“I think those who buy silencers are more law-abiding than anybody else,” said Miller, who figures those who go through all the rigmarole mustn’t be criminally minded. And I do suppose any good businessman always thinks the best of his customers.
Miller sells maybe 30 silencers a month, although he hasn’t seen a big increase in hunters wanting them. He said hunters want them for ear protection.
“It doesn’t give them an unfair advantage, or at least not more of an unfair advantage,” he said. The whole enterprise of hunting “is a little lopsided in the first place.”
Besides, he said, whatever you’re shooting at is going to hear the shot either way if you miss. If you hit it, then it’s all a moot point.
His silencer market ranges from sport shooters, to an elderly lady who shoots a .22 in her backyard and doesn’t want to bother her neighbors, “to the guy who bought one because they’re cool — and because you can.”
CNNMoney noted that sales of silencers have become popular (“booming,” they said): “The civilian market for silencers soared 37 percent in 2013, when the total number shot up to nearly a half a million, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives registry. That’s compared to 360,000 in 2012 and 285,000 in 2011.”
Reasons for silencers? Less recoil, less noise (obviously), less flash and ear protection, Miller said. They just make for a more copacetic shooting experience.
A silencer isn’t silent
The term “silencer” is really a misnomer because it’s almost impossible to make an explosion go away. Rather, it’s more of a muffler for your gun, a series of baffles through a steel tube that absorbs the gas explosion as it exits the chamber. The term “suppressor” is more apt, although not nearly as sexy.
I asked to hear a large-caliber gun fired through a silencer, and so I clicked off several shots from a .45-caliber Glock 21. It was still loud as hell, even with ear muffs and a $700 silencer. (The gun lists for about $600.) It's nothing like the tick tick tick that you hear in movies when the hitmen are performing their duties.
I called retired prosecutor Jack Mallard, who handled “several hundred” murder cases in Fulton and Cobb counties and obtained the most macabre, and coolest, nickname available — “Blood” Mallard.
“My God, I’ve seen it all, aggravated assaults, killings, shootings,” he said, recounting a career built on mayhem. “Thousands of cases crossed my desk. But no silencers. That’s a thing for the movies.”
Or for some old boy sitting out there in a tree stand.
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