OSD 270: The state of the silencer industry

How silencers have evolved, and why in the future they'll be on every gun.

Ever since the National Firearms Act of 1934, silencers have been in a potential well. A commenter on the physics Stack Exchange made this helpful drawing of what that looks like:

A ball wants to roll all the way down a hill to release all its energy. But if it gets stuck in a hole, it needs to roll up the hill before it can roll down. It needs an external energy source. The NFA is the hole, and silencers are just starting to feel some external energy from the internet that’s going to get them out of the hole. But before we get into that, let’s talk about how they got in the hole and what they’ve been doing in there.

You can break the history of the silencer industry into four eras. We’ll take them in turn.

Invention (1902-1934)

Hiram Percy Maxim wasn’t the first to invent a silencer, but he was the first to sell a meaningful number. That was in 1902. He also coined the term “silencer”, originally spelled with a capital S as it was his brand-name product, the Maxim Silencer.

We haven’t been able to find ownership numbers from the era, but anecdotally silencers were a well-known accessory that remained limited to hobbyists. Historical Firearms has a good article on the subject and notes that by 1912, Maxim was seeing slow growth in the consumer silencer market and pivoted towards the military. The company won a military contract for 100 silencers in 1912, and another contract for 9100 in 1916, during World War 1. Not exactly a smash hit. In 1925 — nine years before the NFA — Maxim re-focused the company on car mufflers (which he also invented) and silencers for industrial machines.

Silencers weren’t a secret — Teddy Roosevelt was fond of them and they were of course well-known enough to make it into the NFA — but by 1934, they hadn’t hit the mainstream yet. (Side note, it’s not at all clear why they were included in the NFA. An old reddit post combed through the congressional record and found no substantive mention of silencers at any point in the debate. Just a couple references to them when people were reading, or referring to, the text of the bill.)

The long sleep (1935-1994)

For decades after the NFA’s passage, there was no meaningful consumer market for silencers. We’ve only been able to find data from the ATF going back to 1990. The ATF releases data on the number of Form 4’s they process, and separately they’ve said in several years that the percentage of Form 4’s that are for silencers hovers around 80%. So this chart uses the ATF’s Form 4 data up to 2020 (the latest we’ve been able to find) and multiplies each year’s numbers by 0.8 to estimate the number of silencers sold:

The market used to be trivial. In 1990, roughly 5619 silencers were sold in the entire country. Assuming (generously) an average price of $1000, the total revenue for all civilian silencer sales across the entire industry was under $6 million.

Silencers were basically just oddball spy gear, and this was also the pre-web era when the NFA process was daunting. Most people only knew how it works through word of mouth at the local gun store. People would hear things like, “You need a Class 3 license to own a silencer, and it means the ATF is allowed to come search your house anytime they want to”, and they’d take it as the truth. Because how would they know it wasn’t?

We mark the end of this era in 1994, with the founding of Advanced Armament Corporation. It took more than a decade for anything to change in the market, but that company was the first to start pioneering the next era.

Cambrian explosion (1995-2017)

This was when silencers entered the consciousness of mainstream gun owners. Three factors played into this:

1. Way, way more products. Almost every silencer company operating today was founded in this period, and that accelerated as the period went on. Modular mounting systems, flow-through designs, multi-caliber products, full-auto ratings, different end caps, modular cans, user-serviceable cans, you name it. It all hit the consumer market in this time, and mostly starting in the mid-aughts.

2. Legalization. A number of manufacturers founded the American Suppressor Association in 2011, and they quietly built an incredible track record. They successfully lobbied to legalize suppressed hunting in 18 states, and to repeal silencer bans in Minnesota, Iowa, and Vermont.

3. Education. Social media did its thing here. People could easily hear suppressed gunfire for the first time (albeit through a computer). It’s not quite mainstream common knowledge that silencers don’t sound like they do in the movies, but it is common knowledge within the gun community. And that’s even starting to break into mainstream channels.

These created a virtuous cycle, culminating in 2016. The 2017 spike on the ATF’s graph above is because of a huge silencer sales spike in 2016 — the ATF just didn’t get through processing most of the forms until 2017. What happened is that in 2016 the ATF enacted Rule 41F, which required you to submit a passport photo and fingerprints with your Form 4 even if you were using an NFA trust. That data hadn’t previously been required for a trust, so there was a big rush to submit trust applications before 41F took effect. The 2016 election likely also played into this.

That all had the effect of pulling forward 1-2 years worth of silencer sales — and then cratering sales in 2017-2018. Companies struggled, and it wasn’t until 2019 that sales caught back up to the long-term growth curve.

Crossing the chasm (2018-present)

The ATF hasn’t released recent data on the number of Form 4’s they’ve processed, but we can estimate it. They did release this chart:

That data counts each NFA item multiple times, since for example a silencer might have 1-2 Form 3’s and then a Form 4 before it gets into your hands. But if we assume the relative changes year to year in the total number of forms processed also reflects the relative change in the number of Form 4’s processed, we can add guesstimates for 2021 through 2023 to our previous graph:

So for every silencer that was sold in 2016, three were sold in 2023.

Another way to think of that: more silencers were sold from 2020 to 2023 than in the previous 30 years combined.

Another way to think of that: as of May 2021, there were 2.6 million silencers in the NFRTR, the ATF’s registry of NFA items. That number includes all silencers owned by both consumers and state and local law enforcement. Even if sales (implausibly) stay completely flat after 2023, consumers are buying enough to replace every silencer in the NFRTR — including all of those owned by police — every 8.67 years.

Consumer education is also getting serious. Silencer buyers know a lot more today than they used to, and they’re well-armed with information. Pop into any /r/NFA thread from Pew Science and you’ll see regular people talking about waveforms and back pressures.

This all benefits consumers who don’t know much, and maybe don’t care to know much. They want to shop around quickly, get something good, and not overspend. Today they get things like interchangeable mounting systems and Pew Science’s comprehensive rating system because of the work of obsessive hobbyists during the Cambrian explosion era.

The future (present-?)

Exponential curves like the one above don’t just stop. The consumer demand is there, and it’s accelerating. And that’s happening just as NFA wait times are coming down. From the NSSF:

Updated times announced today by ATF show the average wait time on a paper NFA Form 4 — the most popular NFA form submitted — dropped to an average of 245 days for processing, while average daily processing times for electronic eForm 4’s dropped to 53 days. Previously, wait times on Form 4’s were near 280 days for paper form processing and between 90 and 190 days for electronic processing. NSSF has learned that in some cases fully electronic Form 4’s were processed in as few as four days and in some cases on the same day.

There’s still the $200 tax, but over time that matters less and less. Where this gets really interesting is integral silencers. In a world of NFA wait times measured in days, there’d be a real market for most mid- or high-end firearms being integrally suppressed. If they’re already spending $1000+, a lot of people would be willing to pay an extra $200 for a dramatically better shooting experience.

The factors are aligned for silencers to go truly mainstream in the next few years. We’re excited to see that happen. Hiram Percy Maxim has been waiting for this for 122 years. He’s about to get his wish.

---

This week’s links

Man convicted of possessing homemade guns at his home in New York

Via Maj Toure.

From a news story on the case: “Police investigators determined Taylor ordered ‘ghost gun kits’ from online sellers and had them shipped to his Brooklyn apartment, according to prosecutors.”

The ATF raided Polymer80 in December 2020 and seized their customer records. Curious if this case emerged from an agent on that raid fishing through Polymer80’s data for ban state addresses.

Note on statistics from David Yamane’s “10 Essential Observations About Guns in America“ webinar

Via Jonathan Steigman.

---

More about Open Source Defense

Merch

Rep OSD.

OSD Discord server

If you like this newsletter and want to talk live with the people behind it, join the Discord server. The OSD team is there along with tons of readers. See you there.