Silence is Golden

by Hap Rocketto

The winter had closed in and I was watching a bit more television than usual. A bowl of popcorn, balanced on my belly, gently rose and fell with my breathing as I peered over it at the screen. Idly flipping through the channels I was surprised to see a black and white movie. Even more intriguing was the sight of a man attaching a long tube to the muzzle of a revolver. I cranked up the volume a bit and began to pay attention.

It was a Hollywood crime story in the film noir genre popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These films’ plots usually revolved around a private detective involved with a lady of questionable virtue. The more notable classic of the type were directed by big names such as John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock and starred actors of the stature of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Rita Hayworth, and Barbara Stanwyck. The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Key Largo, and Notorious come to mind. However, the one I was watching was an example of the B movies which were poorly imitative of the pulp fiction style of Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlow, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, or Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

The character on the screen was talking out of the side of his mouth to his fellow henchman as he screwed the tube onto the revolver. “With this silencer no one will hear this poor sap get it and the dumb flatfoot that comes to investigate won’t have a clue either ‘cause there won’t be no shell casing lying around.”

OK, it was only a B movie and suspension of belief is usually needed to swallow the plot but the gunsel was only speaking a half truth. True, the revolver would not eject any spent cases, as would a semiautomatic pistol, usually a Colt 1911 derivative which seemed to be the firearm of choice of a B movie criminal. However, silencers do not work on wheel guns.

Silencers, heavily regulated in the United States by the 1934 National Firearms Act, are a regular feature in spy and crime movies. The loud report from a firearm takes place in two parts. The first is caused by the rapid expansion of gases as the powder in the cartridge case burns. The second noise is that made by the projectile passing through the sound barrier, a miniature sonic boom if you will. The latter can be eliminated by using a sub sonic cartridge and limits the calibers available, .22 being the most popular, and the former by a silencer or suppressor.

A silencer is little more than an automobile muffler that works by trapping the powder gases at the muzzle of the firearm, allowing them to dissipate over a longer period of time. A tube with internal baffles creates a series of chambers which may be filled with metal mesh or steel wool and it called a “dry” suppressor. If the baffles are filled with a liquid or gel, which is more efficient, it is a “wet can” suppressor. An efficient silencer will almost completely eliminate the gas sound so that only the movement of the action is heard. In a pinch it has even been reported that a potato, the fabled “Irish Silencer,” can be stuck on the end of a firearm for a one shot field expedient. The firearm system must be closed to work and the gap between the cylinder and the barrel of a revolver cannot be sealed, thereby making a silencer on a revolver useless.

A silencer does, however, resemble a bloop tube. Used on target rifles to extend the sight radius, the barrel extension causes the report of the rifle to have a popping or hollow thumping sound. This sound, rather than the normal sharp report, gives the device its moniker.

Some bloop tubes are equipped with a tuner device. Part of the smallbore community believes a barrel can be tuned to give the smallest and roundest possible group by placing a movable weight on the barrel and sliding it back and forth in tiny increments, test firing at each move, until the sweet spot is found. This takes time and ammunition and for that reason tuners, although popular with the bench rest crowd, are not all that accepted with prone and position shooters. In order to determine the sweet spot location, and be able to return to it, most tuners have an index mark in the stationary mounting piece and a series of numbers inscribed on the revolving collar.

This fact reminded me an interesting and amusing situation involving Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue Service and Lones Wigger. The British have some pretty Draconian firearms laws and tightly control the flow of firearms in and out of the country. Upon arriving for the 2009 Lord Earl Roberts Trophy Match we had registered our rifles with British customs and obtained the necessary permits. As we were leaving the serial numbers were again checked against the entry records.

Oddly enough, in light of the restrictive British firearms laws, silencers are legal and relatively easy to acquire in the realm. As our rifles were being examined for departure one of Her Majesty’s loyal servants was inspecting Wigger’s bloop tube/tuner equipped rifle. Not knowing at what he was looking, and with his curiosity aroused, the agent asked why the suppressor had a fiducial mark and the rotating adjustment bezel had numbers embossed upon it.

At this rather delicate moment in our departure, before Wigger could reply, a bold wag on the team loudly volunteered, “Oh, that is just to adjust the volume.”

We were all allowed to leave the country anyway. Or, maybe, that is why we were allowed to leave the country as quickly as we did.