Why is that?
Those work for gunshots? I thought ANC works by analyzing constant sounds and playing their inverse waveform. How would that work for unpredictable short sounds like gunfire?
I was expecting both, actually (hearing protection and a suppressor + subsonic munitions). Would they allow that?
PS Side question, if I may… hopefully this isn’t a rabbit hole? What is the proper type of ammunition for home defense purposes, that would have minimal penetration through walls and be less likely to ricochet? I hope I never have to use it, but if I do, I’d rather not risk the neighbors too. Are there less than lethal rounds available to the general public that would likely be sufficiently incapitating at living room range without being altogether fatal?
The restriction against SBRs was idiotic from the start. It’s a good example of how bad laws get made. The intent of the NFA was to restrict easily concealable weapons, like SBRs and pistols. But a lot of people owned pistols and a lot of manufacturers were making money selling pistols, so they lobbied to get that removed from the final version of the NFA. SBRs weren’t much of a thing, and there weren’t a lot of folks making them, so no one fought to remove them from the NFA.
The end result was that the NFA prevented you from owning a concealable SBR and instead forced you to buy a much more easily concealable pistol instead.
So in order to prevent crimes with concealable weapons they forced people to always use more concealable weapons.
Completely idiotic.
The NFA was only constitutional in the first place because it was based on a tax. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill lowered the tax to $0. Now that the NFA was no longer a tax, that brought the constitutionality of the NFA into question.
This triggered a court case based only on the silencer (suppressors for the pedantic folks out there) portion of the NFA, but the end result of the court case was that the regulations on both silencers and SBRs were deemed unconstitutional.
This left a lot of folks uncertain about how this would be regulated, and a lot of folks were hesitant to rush out and buy a suppressor or a SBR.
Then the ATF issued clear guidance about how the NFA would now be enforced, or not enforced, based on the court ruling. So now you can safely purchase a suppressor or a SBR without worrying about the NFA. However, state laws still apply, and IIRC about a dozen or so states still have regulations for SBRs and suppressors.
The NFA restrictions on machine guns and destructive devices still remain intact, as these items are still taxed. The Big Beautiful Bill did not change the tax on these.
Note that the definition of a machine gun is that it fires more than one round on a single pull of the trigger. This gets into an interesting legal area when you consider a “forced reset trigger” or FRT. This type of trigger is forced back to its reset position every time the weapon is fired, so technically each trigger pull only fires one round. It therefore does not fall under the NFA definition of a machine gun. However, with this type of trigger, if you just constantly pull back on the trigger, the weapon constantly cycles and fires the next round. The only difference is that with a true “machine gun” according to the NFA definition, the trigger would remain pulled and wouldn’t move as the weapon fires, but with a forced reset trigger you’ll feel the trigger cycling back and forth along with the weapon firing.
The ATF classified FRTs as machine guns in 2021. However, this was dropped after a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 and a Department of Justice settlement in 2025.
So technically a machine gun is still regulated by the NFA. But FRTs aren’t machine guns. This change in FRTs is from last year and isn’t part of the recent court ruling and ATF announcements, but FRTs, SBRs, and suppressors are all starting to hit the shelves roughly simultaneously.
If you don’t use subsonic ammunition, you’ll still get a very loud “crack” from the bullet traveling at supersonic speeds. Subsonic ammunition is pretty much a requirement if you want your suppressor to really be effective.
Noise cancelling headphones, as mentioned above, are also a good recommendation.
Most ranges require hearing protection regardless of what you are shooting. After all, the person next to you might not be shooting a suppressed weapon, so everyone on the range needs hearing protection.
Most ranges don’t care what type of hearing protection you have, they only care that you have something. So you can have fancy shmancy noise cancelling headphones, or you can have plain old non-technical ear muff type protection. You can even use ear plugs if you want.
Incapacitating shots are mostly a Hollywood myth. Most people aren’t instantly incapacitated by what is actually a fatal wound. Anything that you could classify as sufficiently incapacitating is by its very nature likely to be fatal.
That said, if you are looking to minimize penetration through walls and potential damage to family members in other rooms or neighbors, look for lightweight frangible rounds. These are designed to fragment and lose a lot of their energy if they hit drywall. They will still go through a wall though, but they will do less damage to anything on the other side of it. Also note that the lightweight rounds may cause malfunctions in some weapons since they sometimes don’t provide enough energy to cycle the weapon properly.
Donno, but I think it’s on a sign. I’m not interested in a suppressor, so I didn’t ask.
Yes, they work quite well. Surprised me, donno exactly how they work. Everyone at my range wears them. Mine where about $70. You do still hear a ‘pop’.
Yep, You can borrow hearing protection for free. I like the noise canceling ones so I can still hear my wife and the range master.
Thanks for a very comprehensive post. It’s been years since I was in the shooting game, but I’m still interested in the whole arena.
To summarize, the ammosexuals will soon all be able to buy de facto machine guns that they’ve been craving and at no particular price premium to semi-autos once the production ramps up. Great. Just great. And just in time for political violence.
Note that there’s a vast gulf between responsible gun owners / users and ammosexuals.
De facto machine guns with suppressors!
They have ended the requirement for separate registration of silencers here as well (after talking about it for years without doing anything).
Actually they will only give you immunity for them while you have a firearm certificate - once you cease to have one they will still nail you to the wall.
And the FRTs are just a couple of small internal parts which for most applications can be 3D printed for nearly no cost. The online files for them are free. The better ones are 3D printed using stronger material or machined from solid metal.
I recently watched a video where the operator racked the bolt back and forth by hand and you could watch the trigger finger go back and forth. It’s a very clever idea.
And created the IMO daft phenomenon of the “AR Pistol” - a product that’s basically the receiver of an AR minus the stock and with a very short barrel, pretty useless as a freehand pistol w/o an accessory they called an “arm brace” which is for all purposes a detachable stock but ATF won’t hold it against you.
Basically the market filled the niche with a crappified version of the thing, that every outside observer could tell was that, but the regulator winked at.
Apropos of nothing, but interesting in the context of this thread.
Hand cranked Gatling guns have always been legal at the federal level.
There are some really interesting videos out there of people making and firing them if you’ve got some time to dive that rabbit hole.
How do suppressors affect recoil? My AR-10 in .308 has a muzzle brake that makes it so much easier to shoot, but brother is it loud. It would be cool to suppress it but not if it brings full recoil. Tempting to buy a suppressed .22 for gophers… As far violence with full-auto, yes, in a mass shooting situation it’s bad, but in a more “regular” violent situation it makes accuracy much much worse. Plenty of videos of wanna be’s shooting their Mac-10s and not even hitting the paper at 25 yards,
If anything, suppressors reduce barrel rise by the virtue of adding mass to the end of the barrel. And since 22s recoil is negligible, you shouldn’t notice any difference at all.
Personally, I’m in @Projammer’s camp, waiting for supply/demand to crest and then affordability to creep in. Mostly I want a reasonable sized silencer I can use on my pistol caliber weapons: my 40 S&W for home defense (which it would mostly stay on) or my 9mm Gen-3 Keltec Sub9.
The reason for the home-defense option being rather obvious, it’s the one time I’d be most likely to shoot without hearing protection, it sits in a biometric safe so the extra space isn’t an issue, quality subsonic JHP I should expect good performance.
The jet of exiting gases is much slower.
Yes, and everyone else would need to be shooting that. Of course some calibers are normally subsonic.