Silencers: The NRA’s latest big lie - Salon.com Sunday, Dec 30, 2012 12:00 PM UTC Silencers: The NRA’s latest big lie Silencers could give the next Adam Lanza even more time to kill -- but to the NRA, they protect kids' hearing (Credit: Kuzma via Shutterstock ) A gruesome holiday season exercise: Think of some firearms and accessories that might have added to the body counts of Aurora and Newtown. More starkly, imagine the means by which coming Auroras and Newtowns will be made more deadly. The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers.

By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder. It should surprise no one that the NRA has recently thrown its weight behind an industry campaign to deregulate and promote the use of silencers. Under the trade banner of the American Silencer Association , manufacturers have come together with the support of the NRA to rebrand the silencer as a safety device belonging in every all-American gun closet. To nurture this potentially large and untapped market, the ASA last April sponsored the first annual all-silencer gun shoot and trade show in Dallas. America’s silencer makers are each doing their part. SWR Suppressors is asking survivalists to send a picture of their “bugout bag” for a chance to win an assault rifle silencer.

The firm Silencero — “We Dig Suppressors and What They Do” — has put together a helpful “ Silencers Are Legal ” website and produced a series of would-be viral videos featuring this asshole . This Silencer Awareness Campaign is today’s gun lobby in a bottle. The coordinated effort brings together the whole family: manufacturers, dealers, the gun press, rightwing lawmakers at every level of government, and the NRA. Each are doing their part to chip away at federal gun regulation in the name of profits and ideology. Together, they plan to strip the longstanding regulatory regime around silencers, and reintroduce them to the gun-buying public as wholesome, children-friendly accessories, as harmless as car mufflers. In case you’re wondering, the answer is yes, the gun lobby’s grand strategy rests grotesquely on fake concern for child hearing health. Among the opening shots in the campaign was a feature in the February 2011 issue of Gun World, “Silence is Golden,” penned by the veteran gun writer Jim Dickson. “One only has to look at children in the rest of the world learning to shoot with silencers, protecting their tender young ears, to see what an innocent safety device we are talking about here,” writes Dickson.

“To use an overworked propaganda phrase, legalize silencers ‘for the sake of the children.’” [Emphasis mine.] Proponents of healthy hearing will be heartened to know the NRA shares Gun World’s concern for America’s tender young ears. The organization officially entered the silencer-awareness fray in November of 2011, around the time the Utah-based American Silencer Association was founded. It’s opening statement took the form of an article posted to its lobbying division website: “Suppressors: Good for our hearing… And for the shooting sports.” With this piece, the NRA finally acknowledged the relationship between health care costs and guns. “Billions of dollars are spent every year in our healthcare system for hearing loss conditions, such as shooting-related tinnitus,” explained the NRA. It was a very important point that had long been overlooked in the gun control debate; because if there is a single pressing gun safety issue in America today, it is the hearing, comfort and convenience of recreational shooters who find orange earplugs unsightly. The NRA is also extremely concerned about the fright children may receive from shooting or standing near the reports of high-caliber weapons.

These jolts could have a lasting and detrimental developmental impact, possibly imbuing America’s impressionable and tender young brains with the notion that guns are loud, dangerous things. The NRA firmly believes that American freedom is best served by giving 9mm gunfire the feel and sound of a toy cap gun. As the NRA’s Lacey Biles put it during last April’s Dallas Silencer Shoot, silencers are good for “getting younger folks involved [in guns]. They’re less afraid of the loud bang.” For these reasons, the NRA believes America must “move to eliminate the laws, regulations and policies that discourage or prohibit suppressor use.” And move we have. The NRA has enjoyed state-level success chipping away at restrictions on the use of silencers around the country, an effort that has proceeded largely unnoticed in the shadows of higher-profile battles over the spread of Concealed Carry and Stand Your Ground laws. Silencers are currently legal with permit in 40 states, a growing number of which are rescinding bans on their use while hunting. The gun lobby’s silencer campaign has bigger prey in mind than state hunting laws. Silencers are among the few accessories regulated by the National Firearms Act.

To purchase or transfer a silencer, you must acquire a special license, enter the serial number in a federal registry, and pay a $200 fee. (The fee, which equaled a de facto ban in 1934, has not been adjusted for inflation in 79 years.) For gun extremists who struggle with introductory-level American history and political theory , the licensing regime is half Stamp Act, half Yellow Badge. What most outrages the manufacturers about the regime is that it works. By licensing silencers, tracking and taxing their exchange, the government has kept them from flooding the market like so many other military-market gun accessories with cameos in recent massacres and serial sniper attacks. “Simple licensing requirements weeds out both blatant criminals and a certain kind of stockpiling insurrectionist who refuses to engage with the federal government,” says Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “The law has been effective.” Aside from offering a very expensive alternative to earplugs, what conceivable sporting or personal-defense purpose is served by pouring silencers into a gun market dominated by semi-automatic pistols and assault rifles? If history offers any useful clues, and it usually does, the answer is none.

The history of the silencer is a twentieth century tale populated by Mafiosi hits, hidden snipers, and special ops ambush teams. It all adds up to decades worth of “negative branding baggage” that the gun lobby is now trying to scrub away like a used car-salesman winding back the speedometer on a lemon. The silencer began innocently enough. When Hiram Percy Maxim patented the first silencer in 1908, he was just a nice fellow working in the family business, a guy who simply enjoyed finding ways to make loud things quiet. Among Maxim’s many other inventions was an early muffler design for car engines. A quarter-century later, silencers still hadn’t acquired the bad rep they have today. Their best-known criminal use at the time of the 1934 law was as an aid in late-night poaching. Society did not form its lasting perceptions of the silencer in the decades of Percy’s .22 pistols and midnight pig poaching. The image the NRA must scrub is the one that formed early in what might be called the Second Silencer Age, when a new breed of steel “cans” emerged and became associated with rapid, discreet, controlled killing.

The silencers the gun lobby is trying to mainstream can make ninjas of high-caliber handguns, long-barrel sniper rifles, and assault weapons, all commonly featured in military-themed silencer ads. The Second Age that produced these tools was commenced not by a charming dynastic American industrial engineer with wide interests like Percy Maxim. Rather, it was born in the rural Georgia kill-gadget lab of a notoriously cracked and ruthless CIA black ops contractor, known in gun circles as the Wizard of Whistling Death. * * * Mitch WerBell gained his reputation for cold-blooded efficiency during his days with the CIA’s wartime precursor, the OSS. After the war he maintained his ties to the Agency as a man who could be depended on to figure out how make problems go away. His accomplished his revolutionary leap in silencer technology in 1967, during a short break from international intrigue. The previous year, federal agents raided WerBell’s mercenary training camp in Florida, where he was in the final stages of preparing an army of Miami-based Cubans to invade Haiti and oust “Papa Doc” François Duvalier .

WerBell patented his silencer under the name of his boutique weapons development firm, SIONICS, or Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion. WerBell’s silencer was the first to successfully muffle automatic and semi-automatic weapons fire. On some weapons, the silencer also increased accuracy and power. Knowing he had a big breakthrough on his hands, WerBell convinced a group of rich investors that his invention would make them new fortunes, and just maybe win the Cold War for the West along the way. Oddly, the gang of investors included the eccentric and liberal antiwar philanthropist Stewart R. Mott. According to some accounts, WerBell sold Mott by telling him the principles behind the silencer could be adapted to lawn mowers and other devices to reduce suburban noise pollution. WerBell’s silencer not only decreased the volume of the gun’s report and increased its accuracy; it also reduced the powder flash of machine gun fire, opening up new possibilities for nighttime ambush and assassination missions. WerBell packed his silencer and flew to Indochina, where he wowed American and South Vietnamese brass.

Orders from the Pentagon soon followed, and in 1968 WerBell began large-scale production of his silencers under a SIONICS subsidiary he named Environmental Industries, a sarcastic reference to his intended contribution to solving the strains of overpopulation. The timing of the new silencer’s introduction to Vietnam was just right for business. By 1968, the U.S. had pivoted from away from its early strategy that included an effort to “win hearts and minds,” and had embraced a model of search-and-destroy exemplified by the death squads of the CIA’s Phoenix Program. The M-16s carried by these special units were retrofitted with SIONICS silencers. They soon reported increased lethality and accuracy in ambushes and targeted killings. In his out-of-print 1978 masterpiece, “Spooks,” former Harper’s editor Jim Hougan reports that Green Beret officers singled WerBell’s invention out for praise in Congressional budget hearings. According to Hougan, WerBell consumed the Army’s official kill counts like a 12-year-old reads box scores. From his compound in Georgia, he relished Pentagon data demonstrating his silencer’s economy and lethality.

In the late 1970s, he boasted to Hougan that Army rifles equipped with his silencers helped kill nearly 2,000 Vietcong in the first six months, and reduced the number of bullets per kill to one-point-three rounds, a feat he boasted was “the greatest cost-effectiveness the Army’s ever known.” Whatever the actual numbers, the SIONICS silencer was widely recognized as a huge advance in the science of killing. WerBell emerged from the shadows to become a patriotic cult hero to the fathers of those now agitating for silencer deregulation. In 1972, WerBell played a starring role in David Truby’s admiring study of these new tools and their uses, “Silencers, Snipers, and Assassins: An Overview of Whispering Death.” WerBell didn’t stop tinkering after reinventing the silencer. He also developed the gun he thought his silencer deserved. The result was the ultimate greaser. The ultra-sleek and compact MAC 11 weighed and sized little more than a conventional pistol and spat 14 bullets per second, or 850 a minute.

Had WerBell been working today, he might have produced a semi-automatic version for the civilian market. In the early 1970s, the Pentagon was the only game in town. WerBell fought hard for but failed to land a massive contract to make the MAC a standard-issue weapon. Had he succeeded, SIONICS might be a household name today. (This is how gun empires are born. Gaston Glock designed his first gun competing in an open tender bid to produce a sidearm for the Austrian Army.) The Pentagon’s rejection was the first of two that deepened WerBell’s bitterness at the government he served for so long. As he courted clients among foreign intelligence agencies, the State Department denied him an export license, arguing that the spread of WerBell’s silencers was likely to increase the risk of assassinations around the world. A sign of saner times gone by, there was in the early 1970s no American Silencer Association to help WerBell market his products to preppers with “bugout bags,” and no Wayne LaPierre or Chris Cox to strategize state and national-level assaults on the National Firearms Act.

Instead, WerBell the Wizard of Whistling Death hit the road to peddle his remaining inventory on the global grey and black markets. He sold his wares out of a suitcase like the house-calling gun dealer in Taxi Driver, shooting up stacks of telephone books before giddy prospective clients who marveled over the little machine gun emitting such seductive sibilance, ssyyyt ssyyyt ssyyyt, the contract killer’s lullaby. Before leaving the sideshow stage of history, WerBell made one last lunge for greatness. His hopes of building a gun empire stymied, in 1972 WerBell began planning an amphibious invasion of a tiny Bahamanian archipelago known as Abaco, which was home to a small separatist movement. WerBell enlisted financial support from real estate mogul and Libertarian Party leader Mike Oliver, whose Phoenix Foundation existed to seed utopic Libertarian projects like the one WerBell imagined on the beaches of Abaco — an independent global tax haven, home of SIONICS headquarters, and the Undisputed Silencer Capital of the World.

As with his planned invasion of Haiti eight years prior, WerBell was still training his mercenaries when the whole thing fell apart from infighting and a surprise visit from the Feds. * * * Telling Mitch WerBell’s story is just a long way of demonstrating why the new NRA-backed Hearing Heath First! silencer-promotion campaign is a particularly hideous and towering architectural example of the Gun Lobby’s Nouveau Bat Shit Style, which if not ridiculed and condemned is guaranteed to crash down on all of us, leading to new and yet more lethal mutations in our national plague of gun violence. There are very good reasons why the silencer industry is contending with a nasty case of Vietnam Syndrome. The reason the public associates silencers with death squads, assassination raids, and mafia hits is because these were the uses WerBell had in mind when he engineered them. They are also the uses to which they are best suited and most needed, if that’s the word. It wasn’t all that long ago that even the Freaks of Fairfax understood that the silencer’s dark reputation was deep and well deserved.

As recently as 2000, the NRA showed a rare sensitivity for public perceptions and forbade a silencer manufacturer from exhibiting its wares at the NRA’s national convention. Kevin Brittingham, of the silencer maker Advanced Armament Co., says the NRA’s executive office called him before the millennial year convention in Charlotte and told him not to come. “We don’t want the news media focusing on your table and putting guns in a bad light,” the NRA explained. A decade later, the NRA has cozied up to the industry view that everyone should have a silencer, and that the days are over when WerBell’s toys were the accessory love that dare not speak its name. The NRA now sees the widespread negative view of silencers as a branding problem to be corrected through advertising and public relations. Toward this end, the gun lobby is on multiple fronts advancing the argument that silencer-phobia is the product of popular culture demonization and sensationalism. “Unfortunately, too many Americans (including some gun owners) still fall victim to the unfair portrayals of silencers by Hollywood,” the NRA-ILA gently chides its members.

Gun World’s Jim Dickson, meanwhile, prays for an America that allows its film industry to assist in “the transformation of an innocuous safety and noise-reduction device to a sinister assassin’s tool in the public mind.” If anybody reading this needs one more nudge before abandoning in finality the idea of any kind of “dialogue” with the gun lobby, I suggest reading the NRA and the gun press bleat about the way violent movies have besmirched the good name of the honorable American silencer. They’re pointing to the same Hollywood gun makers routinely employ to product-place its wares, from best-selling pistols to fully automatic shotguns . (In 2011, Glock handguns made corporate cameos in 15 percent of No. 1 films.) The gun lobby pointing to Hollywood is as rich as Wayne LaPierre censuring video games, which thrives at the service of the gun-industry in ways we’re just now beginning to understand. If the current campaign succeeds in delisting silencers from NFA regulation, the gun lobby likely won’t wait long before targeting the remaining regulatory regimes limiting the circulation of fully automatic machine guns and even hand grenades.

Do not be surprised when you see a 2014 Gun World feature extolling freshwater blast fishing as a great way to connect kids and nature, while reducing the risks of fishing with sharp steel hooks, some of which have dangerous double jags. If you can’t see the safety rationale here, or the Freedom Logic that undergirds it, then you obviously do not care about America’s children and their millions of young tender fingers. Alexander Zaitchik is a journalist living in New Orleans. James Yeager: It's a F*cking Silencer, Not a Suppressor [Video NSFW] - The Truth About Guns The Truth About Guns email Suppressor? I just met her! I’m not sure why anyone would get their proverbial knickers in a twist over whether someone calls a silencer a suppressor, or vice versa, but apparently some do. And James Yeager is having none of it. Hiram Maxim called them silencers, so there.

(Or, at his wikipedia.org page, not.) While the Bard pointed out that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I’m still disappointed that ‘modern sporting rifle’ (MSR) hasn’t replaced ‘assault rifle.’ We lost that one a long time ago and it sucks. This one? Again…who cares? Recommended For You 128 Responses to James Yeager: It’s a F*cking Silencer, Not a Suppressor [Video NSFW] Jon in CO says: June 2, 2016 at 16:34 Wouldn’t that just being using the government’s preferred language and basically be the same “sin” as submitting to the PC language? In fact isn’t Mr. Yeager basically telling us how to talk the same as the PC police? Screw it. The new term is “sound-reducing-liberal-pants-wetting-inducement-device” and if you don’t use that term I will pull a Yeager and post a YouTube video admonishing you in salty language. You’ve been warned! June 2, 2016 at 19:19 Yes. I’m serious.

Yeager is now acting as the “language police” at the same time be complains about the PC language police. Whenever someone tells me how to talk, unless they can state a convincing reason that aids in communication, I’m going to give them the finger and usually start talking the way they told me not to just to rile them up. Just because the government has a term for something doesn’t mean we all have to use it. 16V says: Except that’s a false analogy. As much as I seldom agree with Yaeger, the fact is he’s right. Words have meaning. The one who is attempting to rename things (exactly like the PC Police) is, in fact, you. One of the great (and terrible) things about American English is that it always evolves – which males it very useful for a changing and evolving word-space. PC is the renaming of things to appear to be what they are by definition, not. You can label yourself as a cat all you want, the fact is, you aren’t. We can call it a “car” all we want. At the end of the day, the reality is that it is a “horseless carriage” and one cannot argue otherwise. Logically anyway.

To quote Peter Griffin, “I’m, sorry Wilson…” Mr. 308 says: June 2, 2016 at 16:55 Transgender is the accepted term to describe anyone who maybe be anywhere along in the transformation or whose sexual identity may differ than that of their assigned gender at birth. It’s a broad term and is good for non-transgender people to use. This is convenient as one need not search for the correct term when referencing a transsexual or anyone in between. Look at it as the same when referring to someone who may have the same ethnic background of that of….well, Obama. You could call him anything…which I do and quite often, but I believe the correct term now days is black or African American. As far as a can, silencer or scary pants wetting device….who gives a flying turd-ball?

June 2, 2016 at 19:08 @ knightofbob I’ll try to remember “African-American identifying Caucasian” That is certainly more conducive to racial sensitivities than the insensate terminology I’ve been using the past seven and half years 😉 Blindman says: June 2, 2016 at 20:43 There’s no “transition” between male and female. There’s male and female and yes, that even includes males with surgically mutilated genitals and females with surgically mutilated genitals. A woman wearing high heels isn’t “transitioning” into a giraffe. It seems like this would be an easy concept. And no, “BUT IT’S THE CURRENT YEAR!” is not an argument for anything. Avenue Rabbit says: Yes. Seriously, MLee, you are wasting your time with me. Not gonna happen. 16V says: Except Obama is only half black, with a black African father and white American mother – which may make him one of the few people who could accurately use the term “African-American” to describe themselves. The rest are just racist blacks who hate American and whites.

MLee says: June 2, 2016 at 22:31 @ Avenue Rabbit Call a magazine a clip as far as I care. I don’t give a rats ass what you do, say or think anymore than I care what James Yeager says. If people want to sound like ignorant toothless hicks, fine by me Mr. Wabbit. I’m not wasting time engaging myself in entertainment. Avenue Rabbit says: You sure type a lot of words for somebody who doesn’t care. How do I sound like a toothless hick if I never acknowledge the existence of transgendereds? Do you even own a firearm? tdiinva (Now in Wisconsin) says: June 2, 2016 at 23:42 Gender is a linguistic term that has been appropriated by Big Gay to convince people that a woman can have penis and a man can have a vagina. It is a nonsense word. The correct term is transsexual since sex is a biological concept. Stop using the linguistic term gender when you mean sex. June 2, 2016 at 15:09 Silencer, suppressor, can, sound moderator et al.

The only time people annoy me are those that insist that I call them suppressors. This isn’t like clip vs magazine, both terms are correct in this case. June 2, 2016 at 15:31 Good point. While I think we need to use proper terminology, I try to avoid getting bogged down in minutiae when more than one term applies. I have a theory on these terms, and it’s based in the “Hollywood factor”: Silencers are depicted in movies as making all firearms as quiet as a whisper, whereas those who are informed of their actual capabilities see this for the completely inaccurate depiction that it is. It may be that some choose the term “suppressor” simply because they see it as more fitting description of what’s happening – suppression of, rather than silencing of, the weapons report. It should be noted that throughout the body of H.P.

Maxim’s patent application of March 30th, 1909, he uses the term “A silencing device for firearms…” June 2, 2016 at 18:54 I absolutely use “silencer,” “suppressor,” and “can” interchangeably in articles on here — even using all of them in the same post — and nobody has ever cared. They’re all correct. It’s simplistic to act like there’s only one correct, let alone acceptable, term for these things. They’re literally all correct. As is “firearm muffler,” if you’re so inclined. Want my honest opinion of this? Yeager doesn’t care either. It’s click bait (YouTube view bait). And I don’t blame him. It’s smart, actually. Views = money. Heck, here we are with 75 comments and tons of views on the TTAG post already, so it’s been good to TTAG as well.

Thanks, Yeager 🙂 June 2, 2016 at 15:54 When you see the guy telling everyone there’s only one way do this, and it’s his way that’s right and everyone else is completely wrong, or that he has a new “system” – beware. He’s most likely a tacti-tool douchebag trainer that’s validating a curriculum via egomaniacal outbursts or the volume of his argument, rather than the substance. I spent a weekend with a clown trainer similar to Yeager once (I have never trained with Yeager, but I’m certain he has to be at least 10 times better than this guy was) and I will always be significantly more diligent in vetting instructors. Pat Mac is a awesome trainer, completely authentic, and wants you to get everything out of the class you can. Mac is there for the student – I can’t even list all the things I learned from him. Yeager appears to make himself the priority. June 2, 2016 at 20:41 “I spent a weekend with a clown trainer similar to Yeager once” So Tom, what was the problem with the “clown trainer”?

Did he not go over the fundamentals of “maximization of people in a small car” or “effects of seltzer water on makeup” or perhaps left out “proper giant shoe selection”? I mean, Clown College is a serious investment, one should get their money’s worth. Also, sorry to ruin your “This^^^^” Matt in Oklahoma. Tom in Pa says: June 2, 2016 at 22:00 Having some fun with me I see! I did get a good laugh out of that! Apparently he was a clown trainer and I did not undertake proper due diligence at some point. I tried to be brief and set myself up for that one! Honestly, I was disappointed that we didn’t cover packing people into small cars, particularly with the obsolescence of the phone booth. But seriously, I couldn’t begin to describe all the ways that class was dysfunctional, but it suffices to say that if he wore a red nose and a Bozo the Clown wig it might not have been out of place, and unlike the class, at least your concept has the humor value going for it.

Those two days were like boot camp, Okinawa and a month on ship all rolled into one – all while trapped with an instructor that was there for him, rather than the student, and insisted that the gear he has is the best, and everything else is garbage and everyone that used anything different was wrong. Hence, my clown inference. Matt in Oklahoma says: I personally don’t care what you call them. The nearest “official” definition is what the US government calls them SILENCERS. Someone once told me the “correct” term was suppressor. So I looked up what the federal government calls them in their applications and the law. The ATF Form 4 application calls them “Silencers” or “mufflers”. The US Federal Code refers to them as “Silencers” or “mufflers”. U.S.C.

Section 921(a)(24 “24) The terms ‘‘firearm silencer’’ and ‘‘firearm muffler’’ mean any device for silencing, muffling, or diminishing the report of a portable firearm, including any combination of parts, designed or redesigned, and intended for use in assembling or fabricating a firearm silencer or firearm muffler, and any part intended only for use in such assembly or fabrication.” Granted, the federal government did not create the term. The creator of the device device did. And that is good enough for me. But I am not Vocab Nazi. June 2, 2016 at 16:00 This story is an all time low for this site. Why was this story written? And, more importantly, why was it published? Did Yeager pay you to boost his video? Or is he your good friend? Most people don’t respect Yeager and rightfully so. He’s a wannabe alpha male that only surrounds himself with yes men in order to make it look like he is dominant. As somebody else said, he’s a blow hard. He also gives bad information.

And his “I’m the baddest” attitude gave him a nice brush with the law. To put it bluntly, he’s full of himself which is to say he’s full of you know what. This is the exact type of moron that is bad news for guns and other gun owners. Please don’t perpetuate stupidity by posting his YouTube charades. June 2, 2016 at 16:08 Personally I don’t get all hung up on the language, but if Yeager wants to have a technical discussion of language he should FRTHO. Silencer is a legal term used by the government. If Mr. Maxim used that term, then fine, he invented the damn thing he can call it whatever he wants, but that’s basically marketing. “Weight loss pills” don’t generally work as their name suggests but we still call them that don’t we? A silencer/suppressor does not silence a gun. It just doesn’t. We don’t refer to a car’s muffler as a “car silencer” do we? Both operate the same way though.

This is stupid, and in the spirit of stupidity I will now refer to my cans as “the things that go up”, just to tick off people like Yeager. June 2, 2016 at 16:56 We call a toaster a toaster because it toasts. We call a screwdriver a screwdriver because it drives screws. We call a silencer a silencer because it – oh, wait, that doesn’t work, does it? The grammar nazis are losing an opportune moment here. The antis hate “silencers” because they “silence” gunshots, and bad guys will use them. So we should SEIZE on the opportunity to call them “suppressors” or “mufflers”. Then support the Hearing Protection Act by specifically spelling out that we’re only talking about “suppressors”, we’re not talking about “silencers”. In fact, we could offer a “common sense” compromise – we’ll specifically outlaw “silencers”, so long as you’ll agree to the “common sense” health & safety benefits of using a “suppressor” that lowers a gunshot noise down to hearing-safe levels (84 dB).

It’ll still be as loud as a freight train at 10 feet. Seriously, guys, get on the “suppressor” bandwagon; this might be something that can actually be sold to the left because it is legitimately “common sense”. And if we outlaw “silencers” (that reduce a gunshot to whisper levels, which is what they’re worried about) we might be able to get this agreed to. June 3, 2016 at 09:39 Farago, you disappoint me. I thought for you it was all about “the fight.” Words do have meaning, and when people aren’t actually informed, they base their opinions off of the meaning they scavenge from the scattered information they do have. That is why suppressor a superior term. I come from an “uneducated anti-gun background.” That is to say that my family was always pretty much anti gun but didn’t know much about them and never really thought about it. When I got into guns, I got to go through all of the “You think what about guns? No, that’s not true at all!” with them. Talk to someone uniformed about guns and ask them if silencers should be legalized.

In my experience, most people think of silencers as the magical devices they see in the media that allow the assassin to take out target when they turn down an alley or get back to their room with nobody the wiser. Suppressed guns are still loud, most around the level of slamming a car door–not something you could do in next room on the DL. Are you going to hear them a mile away? Of course not. That doesn’t mean they’re silent. Legalize silencers, the tools of assassins? That sounds bad. Legalize suppressors, which bring the report just under the hearing safety threshold –which for most calibers is exactly what suppressors do– well, that doesn’t sound unreasonable! Words matter, in this case in how they’re perceived by people outside of our community. People who unfortunately have some measure of control over our community. We’re not stuck with what people called them before. If the first person to make a suppressor happened to call it the magical gun dildo, we wouldn’t be stuck using that term. This isn’t even about artfully crafting propaganda for “the fight.” Suppressor is far more descriptive of the device then silencer, legal or etymological precedent be damned.

The shotgun silencer: Not really silent - Feb. 1, 2015 The shotgun silencer: Not really silent by Aaron Smith @AaronSmithCNN February 1, 2015: 9:30 AM ET Does a shotgun silencer actually work? This is the thing about gun silencers: They're not really silent. They're not even what you would call quiet. Unless you consider jackhammers to be quiet. That's why the gun industry prefers to call them suppressors, because they suppress, rather than silence, the deafening blast of a gunshot. It's definitely not like in the movies, where silencers are as quiet as a whisper. That hasn't stopped companies from making new silencers. The latest one, made for shotguns is from SilencerCo of West Valley City, Utah. The company demonstrated the silencer to CNNMoney at a shooting range during the Shot Show, a gun industry conference in Las Vegas last month. The noise generated by the shotgun when fired was 155 decibels, as measured by SilencerCo.

The American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association rates that level as "painful" and compares it to "fireworks at three feet." CNNMoney then fired the shotgun fitted with its silencer -- the Salvo 12 -- which was less loud. But not by that much: 132 decibels. The hearing association still rates that as painful, and compares the sound to a jackhammer. This is why silencer companies actually recommend the use of hearing protection even when using their products. They've been around for some time -- automotive engineer Hiram Maxim invented the first silencer in the early 1900s, basing the design on a car muffler. Silencers are expensive and can cost anywhere from $700 to $1,400. They are also not that easy to buy. The federal government slapped restrictions on them in 1934 with the National Firearms Act, which was passed in an effort to control gang violence. The government has the same regulations for silencers as a machine gun.

That means any person who wants to buy a silencer has to mail or fax his or her photo and fingerprints to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and also pay a $200 tax. The approval process can take nine to 10 months. Compared to that, its way easier to buy a gun, which requires a background check that involves showing a photo ID and electronically submitting a form to the ATF. The entire process doesn't take more than 20 minutes. So the bottom line for silencers is that they don't do away with the boom of a gunshot, they are expensive and they are hard to buy. No wonder they appeal only to the most dedicated gun users, like hunters, who usually don't like to wear ear protection.

CNNMoney (Boulder City, Nev.) First published February 1, 2015: 9:30 AM ET American Hunter | Why Would Anyone Want to Hunt With a "Silencer?" Why Would Anyone Want to Hunt With a "Silencer?" by Keith Wood - Thursday, April 10, 2014 SUBSCRIBE The Question In response to a comprehensive gun rights bill that was recent passed in Georgia, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman made the following statement: “It will now be legal in Georgia to hunt with weapons equipped with silencers. Why? I do not know. I do know that suppressing the sound of gunfire in the woods will make it more difficult for hikers, birdwatchers, farmers and other outdoorsmen to know that active hunters are out there.” Mr. Bookman claims to want to know “why?” Well, here are some good reasons. The Facts 1. First of all “silencers,” which are more accurately described as “suppressors,” do not render a gun’s report silent. Like the muffler on a car, a suppressor reduces the noise signature from the discharge of a firearm to a more reasonable level. You see, Mr.

Bookman, guns are loud—loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss. While most shooters wear hearing protection on the range, many hunters don’t wear earplugs or muffs when hunting because it makes it more difficult to hear an animal’s approach. A suppressor can reduce the risk of hearing damage associated with discharging a firearm. When my children are old enough to be exposed to hunting, I hope that I will be able to legally equip their rifles with suppressors to protect their hearing. 2. Suppressors reduce recoil and muzzle blast. High-powered rifles (such as those used for deer hunting) produce a great deal of muzzle blast and significant recoil, neither of which is conducive to good shooting. Humans are susceptible to the “overpressure event” of a gunshot, which can cause a flinch when the trigger is pulled: the body knows what’s coming and it reacts to protect itself from the perceived danger. Suppressors reduce the recoil and muzzle blast therefore making rifles easier to shoot accurately: less recoil and blast, less flinch. This means an increased likelihood of an accurate shot, which means a quick and humane demise for the game animal. 3. Even suppressed, guns are still loud.

The vast majority of hunting cartridges produce supersonic muzzle velocities, which means that even suppressed, they produce an audible sonic “crack” or “boom.” Let’s look at a practical example. One of the most common deer hunting rounds in the U.S. is the .30-06. The cartridge has been around since before World War I and remains the “All American” big game round. It is used by hundreds of thousands of hunters each season. The .30-06 produces a sound signature of approximately 158dB out of a 24” barrel . On the decibel scale , the smallest audible sound (near total silence) is 0 dB. A sound 10 times more powerful is 10 dB. A sound 100 times more powerful than near total silence is 20 dB. A sound 1,000 times more powerful than near total silence is 30 dB. A good suppressor, such as an Advanced Armament Corporation’s $1050 762-SDN-6 , reduces a supersonic rifle’s report by about 25dB.

That means that equipped with a suppressor, our .30-06 will still produce a noise level of around 133dB. So how loud is that? A lawnmower is 90 dB, a car horn is 110dB and a rock concert is 120dB. The Lame Policy Argument The author’s final statement is that "suppressing the sound of gunfire in the woods will make it more difficult for hikers, birdwatchers, farmers and other outdoorsmen to know that active hunters are out there.” Beside the fact that we just established that the suppressed gunfire will still be louder than a car horn, jet engine or rock concert, there is another reason why this is ridiculous. Shotguns are impractical to suppress so we’re talking about rifles here—in Georgia, that means that we are hunting deer. Based on his comments, I am assuming that Mr. Bookman hasn’t done a lot of deer hunting. Deer are prey animals with an excellent sense of hearing.

Loud noises put deer into flight mode and send them running for cover, which is why we deer hunters don’t go firing-off a bunch of rounds to let birdwatchers know that “active hunters are out there." In two decades of deer hunting, I can count the number of times that I’ve fired more than a single shot on one hand. As a journalist, I’m sure Mr. Bookman has access to databases such as Lexis-Nexis. Perhaps he can do a search and tell us how many birdwatchers have been shot by hunters in the 30 states that allow the use of suppressors for hunting big game or varmints? The Call I’m calling “BullShooters" on this one. Mr. Bookman’s comments are devoid of facts or a rational policy argument. Suppressors are a safe and effective tool for hunters and shooters and pose no increased risk to society. Georgia’s legislation does nothing to legalize the ownership of suppressors, that is still strictly-regulated by the National Firearms Act of 1934 which requires a $200 fee, fingerprinting, and background checks beside the nearly yearlong wait for an approval.

IN THIS ARTICLE New Outrageous Lie from NRA: Gun Silencers Protect Kids' Hearing | Alternet News & Politics New Outrageous Lie from NRA: Gun Silencers Protect Kids' Hearing Silencers could give the next Adam Lanza even more time to kill -- but to the NRA, it's got to be protected. Comments A gruesome holiday season exercise: Think of some firearms and accessories that might have added to the body counts of Aurora and Newtown. More starkly, imagine the means by which coming Auroras and Newtowns will be made more deadly. The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers.

By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder. It should surprise no one that the NRA has recently thrown its weight behind an industry campaign to deregulate and promote the use of silencers. Under the trade banner of the American Silencer Association , manufacturers have come together with the support of the NRA to rebrand the silencer as a safety device belonging in every all-American gun closet. To nurture this potentially large and untapped market, the ASA last April sponsored the first annual all-silencer gun shoot and trade show in Dallas. America’s silencer makers are each doing their part. SWR Suppressors is asking survivalists to send a picture of their “bugout bag” for a chance to win an assault rifle silencer.

The firm Silencero — “We Dig Suppressors and What They Do” — has put together a helpful “ Silencers Are Legal ” website and produced a series of would-be viral videos featuring this asshole . This Silencer Awareness Campaign is today’s gun lobby in a bottle. The coordinated effort brings together the whole family: manufacturers, dealers, the gun press, rightwing lawmakers at every level of government, and the NRA. Each are doing their part to chip away at federal gun regulation in the name of profits and ideology. Together, they plan to strip the longstanding regulatory regime around silencers, and reintroduce them to the gun-buying public as wholesome, children-friendly accessories, as harmless as car mufflers. In case you’re wondering, the answer is yes, the gun lobby’s grand strategy rests grotesquely on fake concern for child hearing health. Among the opening shots in the campaign was a feature in the February 2011 issue of Gun World, “Silence is Golden,” penned by the veteran gun writer Jim Dickson. “One only has to look at children in the rest of the world learning to shoot with silencers, protecting their tender young ears, to see what an innocent safety device we are talking about here,” writes Dickson.

“To use an overworked propaganda phrase, legalize silencers ‘for the sake of the children.’” [Emphasis mine.] Proponents of healthy hearing will be heartened to know the NRA shares Gun World’s concern for America’s tender young ears. The organization officially entered the silencer-awareness fray in November of 2011, around the time the Utah-based American Silencer Association was founded. It’s opening statement took the form of an article posted to its lobbying division website: “Suppressors: Good for our hearing… And for the shooting sports.” With this piece, the NRA finally acknowledged the relationship between health care costs and guns. “Billions of dollars are spent every year in our healthcare system for hearing loss conditions, such as shooting-related tinnitus,” explained the NRA. It was a very important point that had long been overlooked in the gun control debate; because if there is a single pressing gun safety issue in America today, it is the hearing, comfort and convenience of recreational shooters who find orange earplugs unsightly. The NRA is also extremely concerned about the fright children may receive from shooting or standing near the reports of high-caliber weapons.

These jolts could have a lasting and detrimental developmental impact, possibly imbuing America’s impressionable and tender young brains with the notion that guns are loud, dangerous things. The NRA firmly believes that American freedom is best served by giving 9mm gunfire the feel and sound of a toy cap gun. As the NRA’s Lacey Biles put it during last April’s Dallas Silencer Shoot, silencers are good for “getting younger folks involved [in guns]. They’re less afraid of the loud bang.” For these reasons, the NRA believes America must “move to eliminate the laws, regulations and policies that discourage or prohibit suppressor use.” And move we have. The NRA has enjoyed state-level success chipping away at restrictions on the use of silencers around the country, an effort that has proceeded largely unnoticed in the shadows of higher-profile battles over the spread of Concealed Carry and Stand Your Ground laws. Silencers are currently legal with permit in 40 states, a growing number of which are rescinding bans on their use while hunting. The gun lobby’s silencer campaign has bigger prey in mind than state hunting laws. Silencers are among the few accessories regulated by the National Firearms Act.

To purchase or transfer a silencer, you must acquire a special license, enter the serial number in a federal registry, and pay a $200 fee. (The fee, which equaled a de facto ban in 1934, has not been adjusted for inflation in 79 years.) For gun extremists who struggle with introductory-level American history and political theory , the licensing regime is half Stamp Act, half Yellow Badge. What most outrages the manufacturers about the regime is that it works. By licensing silencers, tracking and taxing their exchange, the government has kept them from flooding the market like so many other military-market gun accessories with cameos in recent massacres and serial sniper attacks. “Simple licensing requirements weeds out both blatant criminals and a certain kind of stockpiling insurrectionist who refuses to engage with the federal government,” says Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “The law has been effective.” Aside from offering a very expensive alternative to earplugs, what conceivable sporting or personal-defense purpose is served by pouring silencers into a gun market dominated by semi-automatic pistols and assault rifles? If history offers any useful clues, and it usually does, the answer is none.

The history of the silencer is a twentieth century tale populated by Mafiosi hits, hidden snipers, and special ops ambush teams. It all adds up to decades worth of “negative branding baggage” that the gun lobby is now trying to scrub away like a used car-salesman winding back the speedometer on a lemon. The silencer began innocently enough. When Hiram Percy Maxim patented the first silencer in 1908, he was just a nice fellow working in the family business, a guy who simply enjoyed finding ways to make loud things quiet. Among Maxim’s many other inventions was an early muffler design for car engines. A quarter-century later, silencers still hadn’t acquired the bad rep they have today. Their best-known criminal use at the time of the 1934 law was as an aid in late-night poaching. Society did not form its lasting perceptions of the silencer in the decades of Percy’s .22 pistols and midnight pig poaching. The image the NRA must scrub is the one that formed early in what might be called the Second Silencer Age, when a new breed of steel “cans” emerged and became associated with rapid, discreet, controlled killing.

The silencers the gun lobby is trying to mainstream can make ninjas of high-caliber handguns, long-barrel sniper rifles, and assault weapons, all commonly featured in military-themed silencer ads. The Second Age that produced these tools was commenced not by a charming dynastic American industrial engineer with wide interests like Percy Maxim. Rather, it was born in the rural Georgia kill-gadget lab of a notoriously cracked and ruthless CIA black ops contractor, known in gun circles as the Wizard of Whistling Death. * * * Mitch WerBell gained his reputation for cold-blooded efficiency during his days with the CIA’s wartime precursor, the OSS. After the war he maintained his ties to the Agency as a man who could be depended on to figure out how make problems go away. His accomplished his revolutionary leap in silencer technology in 1967, during a short break from international intrigue. The previous year, federal agents raided WerBell’s mercenary training camp in Florida, where he was in the final stages of preparing an army of Miami-based Cubans to invade Haiti and oust “Papa Doc” François Duvalier .

WerBell patented his silencer under the name of his boutique weapons development firm, SIONICS, or Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion. WerBell’s silencer was the first to successfully muffle automatic and semi-automatic weapons fire. On some weapons, the silencer also increased accuracy and power. Knowing he had a big breakthrough on his hands, WerBell convinced a group of rich investors that his invention would make them new fortunes, and just maybe win the Cold War for the West along the way. Oddly, the gang of investors included the eccentric and liberal antiwar philanthropist Stewart R. Mott. According to some accounts, WerBell sold Mott by telling him the principles behind the silencer could be adapted to lawn mowers and other devices to reduce suburban noise pollution. WerBell’s silencer not only decreased the volume of the gun’s report and increased its accuracy; it also reduced the powder flash of machine gun fire, opening up new possibilities for nighttime ambush and assassination missions. WerBell packed his silencer and flew to Indochina, where he wowed American and South Vietnamese brass.

Orders from the Pentagon soon followed, and in 1968 WerBell began large-scale production of his silencers under a SIONICS subsidiary he named Environmental Industries, a sarcastic reference to his intended contribution to solving the strains of overpopulation. The timing of the new silencer’s introduction to Vietnam was just right for business. By 1968, the U.S. had pivoted from away from its early strategy that included an effort to “win hearts and minds,” and had embraced a model of search-and-destroy exemplified by the death squads of the CIA’s Phoenix Program. The M-16s carried by these special units were retrofitted with SIONICS silencers. They soon reported increased lethality and accuracy in ambushes and targeted killings. In his out-of-print 1978 masterpiece, “Spooks,” former Harper’s editor Jim Hougan reports that Green Beret officers singled WerBell’s invention out for praise in Congressional budget hearings. According to Hougan, WerBell consumed the Army’s official kill counts like a 12-year-old reads box scores. From his compound in Georgia, he relished Pentagon data demonstrating his silencer’s economy and lethality.

In the late 1970s, he boasted to Hougan that Army rifles equipped with his silencers helped kill nearly 2,000 Vietcong in the first six months, and reduced the number of bullets per kill to one-point-three rounds, a feat he boasted was “the greatest cost-effectiveness the Army’s ever known.” Whatever the actual numbers, the SIONICS silencer was widely recognized as a huge advance in the science of killing. WerBell emerged from the shadows to become a patriotic cult hero to the fathers of those now agitating for silencer deregulation. In 1972, WerBell played a starring role in David Truby’s admiring study of these new tools and their uses, “Silencers, Snipers, and Assassins: An Overview of Whispering Death.” WerBell didn’t stop tinkering after reinventing the silencer. He also developed the gun he thought his silencer deserved. The result was the ultimate greaser. The ultra-sleek and compact MAC 11 weighed and sized little more than a conventional pistol and spat 14 bullets per second, or 850 a minute.

Had WerBell been working today, he might have produced a semi-automatic version for the civilian market. In the early 1970s, the Pentagon was the only game in town. WerBell fought hard for but failed to land a massive contract to make the MAC a standard-issue weapon. Had he succeeded, SIONICS might be a household name today. (This is how gun empires are born. Gaston Glock designed his first gun competing in an open tender bid to produce a sidearm for the Austrian Army.) The Pentagon’s rejection was the first of two that deepened WerBell’s bitterness at the government he served for so long. As he courted clients among foreign intelligence agencies, the State Department denied him an export license, arguing that the spread of WerBell’s silencers was likely to increase the risk of assassinations around the world. A sign of saner times gone by, there was in the early 1970s no American Silencer Association to help WerBell market his products to preppers with “bugout bags,” and no Wayne LaPierre or Chris Cox to strategize state and national-level assaults on the National Firearms Act.

Instead, WerBell the Wizard of Whistling Death hit the road to peddle his remaining inventory on the global grey and black markets. He sold his wares out of a suitcase like the house-calling gun dealer in Taxi Driver, shooting up stacks of telephone books before giddy prospective clients who marveled over the little machine gun emitting such seductive sibilance, ssyyyt ssyyyt ssyyyt, the contract killer’s lullaby. Before leaving the sideshow stage of history, WerBell made one last lunge for greatness. His hopes of building a gun empire stymied, in 1972 WerBell began planning an amphibious invasion of a tiny Bahamanian archipelago known as Abaco, which was home to a small separatist movement. WerBell enlisted financial support from real estate mogul and Libertarian Party leader Mike Oliver, whose Phoenix Foundation existed to seed utopic Libertarian projects like the one WerBell imagined on the beaches of Abaco — an independent global tax haven, home of SIONICS headquarters, and the Undisputed Silencer Capital of the World.

As with his planned invasion of Haiti eight years prior, WerBell was still training his mercenaries when the whole thing fell apart from infighting and a surprise visit from the Feds. * * * Telling Mitch WerBell’s story is just a long way of demonstrating why the new NRA-backed Hearing Heath First! silencer-promotion campaign is a particularly hideous and towering architectural example of the Gun Lobby’s Nouveau Bat Shit Style, which if not ridiculed and condemned is guaranteed to crash down on all of us, leading to new and yet more lethal mutations in our national plague of gun violence. There are very good reasons why the silencer industry is contending with a nasty case of Vietnam Syndrome. The reason the public associates silencers with death squads, assassination raids, and mafia hits is because these were the uses WerBell had in mind when he engineered them. They are also the uses to which they are best suited and most needed, if that’s the word. It wasn’t all that long ago that even the Freaks of Fairfax understood that the silencer’s dark reputation was deep and well deserved.

As recently as 2000, the NRA showed a rare sensitivity for public perceptions and forbade a silencer manufacturer from exhibiting its wares at the NRA’s national convention. Kevin Brittingham, of the silencer maker Advanced Armament Co., says the NRA’s executive office called him before the millennial year convention in Charlotte and told him not to come. “We don’t want the news media focusing on your table and putting guns in a bad light,” the NRA explained. A decade later, the NRA has cozied up to the industry view that everyone should have a silencer, and that the days are over when WerBell’s toys were the accessory love that dare not speak its name. The NRA now sees the widespread negative view of silencers as a branding problem to be corrected through advertising and public relations. Toward this end, the gun lobby is on multiple fronts advancing the argument that silencer-phobia is the product of popular culture demonization and sensationalism. “Unfortunately, too many Americans (including some gun owners) still fall victim to the unfair portrayals of silencers by Hollywood,” the NRA-ILA gently chides its members.

Gun World’s Jim Dickson, meanwhile, prays for an America that allows its film industry to assist in “the transformation of an innocuous safety and noise-reduction device to a sinister assassin’s tool in the public mind.” If anybody reading this needs one more nudge before abandoning in finality the idea of any kind of “dialogue” with the gun lobby, I suggest reading the NRA and the gun press bleat about the way violent movies have besmirched the good name of the honorable American silencer. They’re pointing to the same Hollywood gun makers routinely employ to product-place its wares, from best-selling pistols to fully automatic shotguns . (In 2011, Glock handguns made corporate cameos in 15 percent of No. 1 films.) The gun lobby pointing to Hollywood is as rich as Wayne LaPierre censuring video games, which thrives at the service of the gun-industry in ways we’re just now beginning to understand. If the current campaign succeeds in delisting silencers from NFA regulation, the gun lobby likely won’t wait long before targeting the remaining regulatory regimes limiting the circulation of fully automatic machine guns and even hand grenades.

Do not be surprised when you see a 2014 Gun World feature extolling freshwater blast fishing as a great way to connect kids and nature, while reducing the risks of fishing with sharp steel hooks, some of which have dangerous double jags. If you can’t see the safety rationale here, or the Freedom Logic that undergirds it, then you obviously do not care about America’s children and their millions of young tender fingers. BROOKLANDS AND ITS SILENCERS | Simanaitis Says About the Author BROOKLANDS AND ITS SILENCERS APPARENTLY THERE’S not enough noise in Formula 1 this year (see ). This got me thinking of the opposite problem: Automobile racing is inherently a very noisy activity and, occasionally, organizers have sought to quell the racket, not enhance it. England’s traditional Brooklands motor circuit is a perfect example. Brooklands was built in 1907 (two years before Indianapolis Motor Speedway) by Hugh Fortesque Locke King in the normally quiet little residential community of Weybridge, about 20 miles southwest of London.

One of the world’s first dedicated venues for motorsports and aviation, Brooklands is 9 miles south of London’s Heathrow Airport. The Brooklands Outer Circuit, a portion of which still exists, was a 2.75-mile oval with some of its banking nearly 30 ft. high. Within two weeks of its official opening, on June 17 – 18, 1907, Brooklands had a 24-hour race (more than 16 years before the first running of the 24-hour race at Le Mans, France). See Grace’s Guide, , for other details of Brooklands events. The Brooklands banking: under construction in 1907 and during my visit in 2008 (see ). Race meetings and record attempts, of both cars and aircraft, became regular happenings, with crowds approaching 300,000. (So vast was the facility that this could still be considered “the Right Crowd, and no Crowding.”) Weybridge neighbors seemed to accept these goings-on until September 1924, at which time they instituted an Action in His Majesty’s High Court against noise at the circuit.

It wasn’t until July 2, 1925, that matters were resolved, the result being the Brooklands silencer. The term “silencer” is the overly optimistic English term for what North Americans call a muffler. The French and Italians follow English style with silencieux and silenziatore, respectively. The Germans parallel North American literalness with Schalldämpfer (sound damper). A Brooklands exhaust system has two chief characteristics: a rhomboidal receptacle located relatively near the engine and a fishtail exhaust at its tip. An MG Car Club article, “Brooklands Silencers—Or Do They?” by Mike Allison, offers definitive concepts, including dimensions of elements depending on engine displacement. This chart gives dimensions of Brooklands silencers for a selection of vintage MGs, the M 12/12 through the NE.

Image from “Brooklands Silencers—Or Do They?” (See .) An Allison conclusion: “I have to say though that for a road car the noise levels are rather on the unsociable side.” I once drove a 1931 MG C-Type, a two-seat sports car powered by a 746-cc single-overhead-camshaft inline-4. It had a Brooklands silencer, the rasp of which caused wonderful resonations throughout the rest of the car. 1931 MG C-Type, the proud possession of a Rob Walker relative. At the other automotive extreme is the 4 1/2-Litre supercharged Bentley of Sir Henry “Tim” Birkin. He drove this single-seat Brooklands special to an Outer Circuit record of 137.96 mph in 1932. The Birkin Bentley sports a proper Brooklands silencer. Another car with a Brooklands exhaust—indeed, a trio of them!—is the fabulous 1933 Napier-Railton.

See and .) Driven by John Cobb in 1933, this car lapped the Outer Circuit at 143.44 mph, a record that stands for all time (as the circuit ceased operation in 1939). The 1933 Napier-Railton, as driven by John Cobb—and sampled briefly by your author. Image by John Lamm. The Napier-Railton’s powerplant is a 24.0-liter (!) broad-arrow 12-cylinder Napier Lion. Each of its three 4-cylinder banks got its own hefty exhaust, massive Brooklands can and proper fishtail. A trio of these silencers didn’t silence very much. Image by John Lamm. The Napier Lion engine was originally designed for Schneider Cup aircraft competition, where silencers were simply not part of the game. In fact, when the Napier-Railton set records in 1935 and 1936 at the Bonneville Salt Flats, it ran with nothing more than four stubby exhaust stacks for each of its three banks. The Napier-Railton ran without its Brooklands silencers at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Added bodywork shielded the driver’s eyes from the exhaust glare at night during the 24-hour record runs. I imagine the Napier-Railton, sans its Brooklands silencers, would have had the Weybridge neighbors sitting up straight. ds © Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2014

Question: What would an American call the silencer on his car
Answer: Muffler