It’s pretty clear that in today’s military, rifle suppressors are a thing.
Long relegated to James Bond movies and secret squirrel types in the U.S. military, firearms mufflers now are becoming more popular in line units. Infantry leaders are beginning to recognize the benefits of silencers, with their ability to help mask a shooter’s location by suppressing both sound and flash.
Experts also preach that a suppressor makes shooting a lot easier on the trooper by reducing recoil and tamping down the “flinch” reaction that inevitably comes from firing a 165 decibel rifle shot.
“Cans,” as they are colloquially known, reduce an M4 rifle shot’s report an average of about 20 decibels — that’s not enough to “silence” them, but it’s enough to meet hearing safety requirements for government regulators.
In fact, the Marine Corps has been experimenting with equipping entire infantry units with suppressed rifles, and sees them as enough of a game changer that they’re pushing to include cans with almost every rifle they shoot.
But how these little tubes of steel or titanium do what they do has always been a bit of a mystery to most shooters. The internal architecture of the suppressor’s baffles are part engineering mastery, part material science part alchemy and each manufacturer has its own design to get the sound down.
Now, an Alabama-based silencer maker has built his cans with a clear, hardened acrylic that shows in vivid detail exactly what’s going on inside when the smoke and flame eject from the muzzle. And YouTuber SmarterEveryDay took his high speed camera to the range and got some amazing footage of the gas and blast dissipating trough a silencer.
It’s a very cool look at a device silencer expert and current 2nd Marine Division Gunner Christian Wade says “increases the effectiveness of your weapon.”
