Sweeney - Gun Digest Book of Suppressors

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Chapter One:
WHY A SUPPRESSOR?

Chapter Two:
HISTORY

Chapter Three:
SILENCER MYTHS

Chapter Four:
HOW THEY WORK

Chapter Five:
WHAT THEY ARE MADE OF AND HOW THEY ARE MADE

Chapter Six:
HOW THEY ATTACH

Chapter Seven:
MEASURING EFFECTIVENESS

Chapter Eight:
RIMFIRE SUPPRESSORS

Chapter Nine:
HANDGUN CALIBERS

Chapter Ten:
RIFLE SUPPRESSORS

Chapter Eleven:
BIG BORES YOU WANT TO SUPPRESS WHAT?

Chapter Twelve:
SHOTGUNS AND THEY SAID IT COULDNT BE DONE

Chapter Thirteen:
ACCURACY

Chapter Fourteen:
GAS CONTROL AND OFF-LABEL USES

Chapter Fifteen:
SIZE, SHAPE, TOLERANCE FOR ABUSE

Chapter Sixteen:
EQUATIONS AND STRESSES

Chapter Seventeen:
HOW TO BUY ONE

Chapter Eighteen:
DO IT YOURSELF

Chapter Nineteen:
TRAVELING WITH SUPPRESSORS

Chapter Twenty:
CARE AND MAINTENANCE

Chapter Twenty-One:
MISTAKES, AMMUNITION AND CORRECTIONS

And as always, Felicia. Ever faithful, ever patient, ever with encouragement and understanding, I am, and remind myself repeatedly, the luckiest man, ever. Those who are keeping track, the poodle count is now down to two. Alas, our youngest, our ADHD poodle who also had Addisons, contracted a gastric cancer that has vague symptoms. So vague that even the specialty vet we took him to missed their importance. So, we have but the two dudes I have to regale with bon mots on walks.

Oh, what a brave new world. Shakespeare had that line in The Tempest from the mouth of Miranda when she first saw a man who was not her father. O brave new world, that has such people in it.

When I started regularly going to the range, it was common to see all manner of deer rifles. Handguns were mostly revolvers, with some hard-core combat shooters using pistols, and the random sighting of a bullseye competitor now and then. Almost no one had a CPL (called a CCW back then), and if they did they mostly kept the news to themselves. ARs were rare, viewed with disdain, and considered inaccurate and unreliable. Machine guns? SBRs? Silencers? You must be kidding, nobody has one of those.

One of the wonders of the old Second Chance match was the Back Range. It was the practice range, and the location for the optional events that took up more room than the Front Range could handle. It was where everyone who had a machine gun could show up and shoot it. And if you had good ammo, or knew the owner, or bought their ammo, you could shoot machine guns. In the fifteen years I went, I had the chance to shoot a rogues gallery of buzzguns, but hardly any suppressed firearms at all. It is hard to imagine a time when machine guns were more common than suppressors. But that was life back in the occasionally good old days.

Times change.

We now live in a time where in some states the number of CPL holders is over five percent of the adult population. ARs are common as dirt. My friend Dave Fortier reports from his flat, dusty, agricultural state that the farmboys no longer have lever-action 30-30s in the windows of their pickup trucks. They have tricked-out ARs behind the seat.

Were they not so ferociously expensive, Im sure wed see a lot more machine guns at ranges and gun clubs. What we do see are SBRs and silencers. They are now no longer a rarity, no longer an ultra-rare sight at ranges and gun clubs, that when I started would have been the talk of the gun club for months afterwards.

And yet, there are a lot of shooters who still dont know about suppressors, or dont know much. Or what they know just isnt true. That is about to change.

One thing I can also add is a quip I just read (for all I know, I wrote it): Education is the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others. There is a lot here, a lot that might not fit with what everyone knows. In a lot of instances, that is most likely because what everyone knows just aint true. And to add a bit of frosting on that cake, read the manual. No, I mean it, despite the alleged deductions from your man-card, read the manual.

Here you have a bunch of gun writers at work. It is fun work, and it is (sometimes) well-paid work, but it is not an encyclopedic education in all things firearms.

Suppressor manufactures include info with your new can. It may be a simple handout sheet, it may be a close attempt at a military TM, but they send info, and you would be wise to read it.

In full disclosure, Im going to extend the military approach, and Im going to tell you what Im going to tell you, then tell you, and then tell you what I told you. Why? Because this is all new to many readers. If youve read a dozen books on, just to pick one, the AR-15, you can skim over the text on a new title and let your eyes/brain pick things up again when you realize you are into something you havent seen before. So much is familiar, you want to skip the overlap and get on with the good stuff, the new stuff. Well, this is all new.

And as a result, I have to get deep into the weeds, explaining a lot of things that are background, because, well (stop me if youve heard this before), this is all new.

So, first well go through the basics, the history, function and use of suppressors. Then well cover the testing and descriptions of a bunch of them, from small to large, plain to exotic. And finally, for those who want it, Ill get really technical (or as technical as I can without putting the editor to sleep) and wrap up with the legalities and a few mistakes to avoid.

When were done, youll know more about suppressors than anyone who hasnt been to a technical class or engineering school, and have a broader understanding than a whole lot of end-users. Yep, thats right, just because someone has a nickname as their radio handle and gets paid by the government, doesnt mean they are an expert on the subject. Just an expert (we hope) user of the tool.

And I hope this book, while informing you, will also give you a bit of humility. Once youve read it, you will be better informed (if I may say so, in all modesty) than anyone else at the gun club. Anyone else in matches. And pretty much any police officer you might meet, or discuss the subject with. And, in a delicious bit of irony, you will probably know more than a lot of the gun writers you will be reading, or have read. While it is fun to point out that the SpecOps people who are adored in some circles are not all gun experts, just more-or-less trigger-pulling experts, it is also humbling to be reminded now and then that even the gun experts arent experts in all things gun-related. And to cut them some slack, theres a truckload (literally, in some cases) of gear that that SpecOps guy knows how to use. Just because someone can use a radio, that does not make them an electrical engineer. In many instances, being able to quickly dial up a digital gizmo and rain ordnance down on the bad guys head will net more dead terrorists than the best trigger-puller could manage with a rifle alone.