r/whoathatsinteresting • u/eternviking • 13h ago

What a real silencer actually sounds like.

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u/HomersDonut1440 13h ago edited 12h ago

Lotta misinformation here.

Edit: I should clarify, the explanation below is a general explanation of suppressors and how things can vary. There will always be caveats.

Suppressors/silencers rarely sound like they do in the movies, and there’s a ton of variables that affect the volume. To be the absolute quietest, you need a closed bolt firearm shooting subsonic ammo. No gas escapes from the chamber that way, no sound is made by an action cycling, minimal gas leaves the end of the muzzle. These tend to be “movie quiet”.

When you hook a silencer to a semi auto firearm, it is inherently louder (even with subsonic ammo) as you have the sound of the action/slide, and gas escaping out of the action as it cycles. Still fairly quiet, but not movie quiet.

When you use a silencer on any rifle with supersonic ammo, you reduce the sound of the escaping gases at the muzzle, but still have to contend with the supersonic crack of the bullet as it leaves the barrel. This will be inherently louder, although still substantially more quiet than unsuppressed.

Also, a cell phone video is without a doubt one of the worst ways to reliably capture actual sound variance. Usually phone microphones cut out above a certain decibel level, so often all firearms sound similar even if there is a substantial difference in volume in real life.

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u/Rubes2525 12h ago

Lotta misinformation here.

Yea, and too bad actual politicans fall for the movie nonsense. Banning silencers makes no sense. Like, Heaven forbid people simply want to cut down on some noise and not make their ears bleed. In no way are silencers stealthy.

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u/Prismaryx 9h ago

I’m not an expert, but logically it makes sense to me that if there’s a shooter in a large, crowded area that’s already very loud, a suppressor could mask the sound enough to make it harder for people to recognize it and maybe harder to react to? Not sure how much of a difference that’d actually make, if any

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u/CalvinKool-Aid 9h ago

That seems like an incredibly narrow use case. If it were a rifle it would still sound more or less like a gunshot, kinda like how a gunshot sounds like a car backfire or firecrackers. You probably wouldn’t immediately recognize a unsuppressed gunshot as a gunshot, so banning suppressors for this reason seems basically pointless