The House has passed a bill that turns suppressors from NFA items into “regular” firearms. This would make buying a suppressor the same as buying a rifle or shotgun (as far as federal law is concerned — states could still have their own additional restrictions). The bill is now in the Senate. It will not get the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster, but because it’s part of a larger budget bill, it will be voted on under budget reconciliation rules which specify that only a simple majority (51 votes) is needed for the bill to pass.
The Senate’s Parliamentarian will give a non-binding opinion* on whether suppressor deregulation counts as budget reconciliation. That opinion will depend on her interpretation of the Byrd Rule, a Senate procedural rule defining the criteria for inclusion in reconciliation. The most relevant criterion here is that a bill must produce a change in outlays or revenues but not one “which is merely incidental to the nonbudgetary components of the provision”. So it comes down to whether the Parliamentarian finds that NFA is (as it was originally pitched) a tax that happens to come with draconian anti-gun punishments, or a draconian anti-gun punishment that happens to come with a tax.
(*The President of the Senate, i.e. the Vice President of the US, has can overrule the Parliamentarian. But the last time that happened is in 1975, and it’s seen as a nuclear option. Unknown whether JD Vance would go to bat quite that hard for silencers. A simple majority of senators can also vote to overrule the Parliamentarian, but that is also rare for similar escalation-spiral-avoidance reasons.)
Where suppressors are at today
We did a bunch of napkin math on this back in April 2024:
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?
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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 reflect 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.
Spoiler: sales did not stay flat after 2023.
In 2024, Americans bought 80% more silencers than they had in 2023. So the numbers in the chart above continued not just growing, but accelerating. We made a prediction (bolded below) about that acceleration back in December 2021:
You can think of product development across an industry — whether it’s software or silencers — as a MMORPG version of what a solo developer is doing at their desk:
Make change → see how it performs → adjust → rinse and repeat
That’s a feedback loop, and it’s how good products emerge over time. Because the output of each loop feeds into the input of the next one, the gains compound. And that means that speeding up the loop produces exponentially faster results — and, at a certain threshold, fundamentally different results. Thinking about the software engineer, if their builds take 1 minute, they’re able to invent cool stuff. If the builds take 1 hour, they’re slow. But if the builds take 1 week, it’s not just slower — it’s different to the point that it breaks the feedback loop entirely, and the cool stuff just never gets invented.
That’s where silencers have been. There are two brakes on demand for silencers: the $200 tax, and the 10-12 month wait time for the paper Form 4. The $200 tax has been getting inflated away for 87 years, and for someone spending $800+ on a silencer, it’s more a troublesome hurdle than an absolute dealbreaker. But the yearlong wait is a different story. That stops people in their tracks, and prevents the industry from getting to a healthy feedback loop of product development.
What would a healthy feedback loop look like? Industry-wide standardized mounting systems. More light-duty cans. And come to think of it, why doesn’t just every hunting rifle in the country have an integrally suppressed barrel? It’s because the yearlong wait has made that a nonstarter. Nobody’s going to wait a year to pick up their gun.
But a lot more people would be willing to wait a few weeks. That’s the promise of making this electronic. Waits will probably be substantial for the initial flood of applications, but should subside over time. And this is all just a first step. The final stop will be to do away with the NFA registry altogether. But the key to that is normalization, and that means getting silencers into millions of people’s hands. And that is what eForm 4’s are going to help do.
The various possible outcomes from here
There are three main possibilities:
The bill is allowed to remain as-is. It will pass the Senate with 50-something votes and the president will sign it into law. That will accelerate the product development feedback loop we described above in the excerpt from OSD 146. A few areas where it will make the fastest impact:
Retail. Way more ecommerce around silencers and silencer accessories.
Manufacturing. The door would be open for $50 cans that you use for a while and throw away. The lowered regulatory barriers would make it easier for manufacturers to experiment with new designs. And lastly it would be easier for startups to form in the space. Today, any silencer startup has to get into the top 2-3 retailers from day 1 to have any hope of succeeding. In a world without NFA rules, startups could easily sell direct to consumer with off-the-shelf FFL transfer tools on their website.
Gun makers. Integral suppression will become more of a thing. Imagine if every company tried to do what SilencerCo did with the Maxim 9, but competed with each other and stuck with it for 5-10 years. Get a few iterations deep, multiply that by having the whole industry working on it, and it will become unusual for guns not to come suppressed from the factory.
The bill’s fallback provision is activated. If the Parliamentarian rules against full removal from the NFA, the bill contains a much-more-likely-to-be-allowed-through-reconciliation provision dropping the NFA tax on suppressors from $200 to 0. Think of that as a permanent ~25% discount on all suppressors. It would produce an initial spike in sales which would settle into a sustained baseline level of sales that’s somewhat higher than today’s — demand curves slope downward, and you’ll sell more of something when it costs $x – 200 instead of $x. It also opens the door somewhat (although not quite as much as outcome #1) to bargain-basement suppressor designs. The downside is that it risks making suppressor regulation seem like “just” some paperwork. That could take some wind out of the sails of long-term NFA reform. On net it’s still a positive development that would further entrench suppressors.
Neither #1 nor #2 happen, and suppressor laws stay as-is.
#3 is the worst outcome, but that puts us all in an unfamiliar position: there’s a gun bill before Congress where the worst-case scenario is that gun laws stay unchanged. Normally that’s the best-case scenario. In fact, Congress has never passed a law that lessened regulations on gun purchases — they’ve only ever ratcheted the rules tighter.
So we’ll see what happens. Outcome #1 would be incredible, #2 would be a nice boost, and #3 would be neutral. “Heads I win, tails I’m neutral” is a positive expected value position. We’ll take that spot every time.
A new forced reset trigger. Similar to the Super Safety, but made of steel. Here’s a detailed review, testing reliability with different uppers and ammo. (Summary: it’s very cool but a bit picky with ammo.)
$200 used to be a significant amount of money, especially in 1934.
Today it's one dinner out for 5 at Chili's.
Oh, you posted about our 320 vid!
We are still working on research into how the 320 internals have been updated, and should have new videos coming out soon.