How do Gun Silencers work? The principle.

If you've ever seen a cloak and dagger type spy movie or a movie with a hit man or something, you might have seen them put the little barrel extender onto the gun, and then sneak up behind someone and it made a cool sound like (simulated gun silencer noises), which is a pretty great silencer impression if I do say so myself. 

Image credit: Google

If you wondered what was going on, or if you're a hit man looking to keep your arms quieter, I'm going to explain to you how a silencer works. We should probably start off by pointing out that they're not actually called silencers. That's what people who don't know what they're talking about call them. They're called suppressors and for good reason. It's virtually impossible to fully silence a gun, because guns are loud, and they're loud in three different ways. The whole loudness starts when the hammer hits the firing pin and makes a nice metallic sound, which isn't too loud, but it's still a sound nonetheless. And it's one of three. When that firing pin hits, it ignites the gunpowder located in the shell which explodes. It explodes into gas, pressurized gas, at about 3000 pounds per square inch. That forcefully pushes the bullet out the end of the barrel and makes quite a bit of sound, like kind of a deadly champagne cork popping as the bullet comes out.

Image credit: Google

That's sound number two, and that's what silencers, I mean suppressors seek to keep down. They do it by extending the barrel and fattening the barrel. What this does is it takes those gasses that are coming out of the gun at 3000 pounds per square inch, and it gives them room to expand inside the silencer, suppressor, or as some people who you probably don't want to associate with call cans, right? Now when this gas expands, it loses some of that pressure, and it decreases from 3000 pounds per square inch to about 60 when it comes out the end of the silencer. Now without a silencer, those explosive gasses produce a sound at about 160 decibels. Which, by the way, is about the point where your hearing tissue dies, and once it dies it doesn't come back. So 160 dB is loud, ear-crushingly loud.

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 When you have a suppressor on the end, it drops those decibels down to about 20, which is about the sound of a very quiet whisper, in a quiet library, heard from six feet away. Also known as simulated silencer noises. Yeah, there's the third sound though that a silencer can't do anything about. You know when an airplane flies overhead and it reaches the supersonic threshold, and it creates a sonic boom? Bullets do that too. Except rather than a blast wave, it's referred to as a flight crack. But at any rate, it reaches the sonic threshold when the bullet reaches a velocity of 1100 feet per second, which is fast. So, to prevent this ballistic crack from taking place, some manufacturers produce ammunition that has bullets that travel at less than 1100 feet per second. They still move pretty fast, but not fast enough to create that little sonic boom. Hence that third sound is then dampened. So, if you have a pretty good silencer and ammunition.

That shoots bullets out at less than 1100 feet per second, what you're left with are a 20-decibel explosion and just a little hammer clicking. Believe it or not, there are some downsides to all this. While you will look cooler, like Javier Barden in No Country for Old Men, who had a silencer on the end of his shotgun, which made his character like 80 times scarier, you're going to be giving up a little bit of power, and a little bit of accuracy. Plus, you can still hear a bullet no matter how silent you make a gun, if you're the one being shot at because it makes a horrible terrifying, unnerving zipping sound while it's coming at you.