Why A Suppressor Belongs On Your Home Defense Gun

Indoor gunfire is punishing. A good suppressor slashes blast, keeps your head clear, and helps you control the chaos when it matters most.

Why A Suppressor Belongs On Your Home Defense Gun

Suppressors are often seen as fun additions for bench shooting or useful tools for hunting, but there is a lot more to reducing decibels than that. Perhaps the most overlooked use for suppressors is home defense, and that is a shame. You should definitely consider mounting a good suppressor to your preferred home defense gun, or guns, and I am going to tell you why.

If you have spent much time in close quarters training with firearms, you already know how the noise level goes up. The report of live fire is somewhat lessened when you are shooting outdoors, but when you go inside, that noise reverberates all around. If you are at the range on the firing line, you can often feel it when someone near you fires a large caliber gun. And if you are in a further enclosed space, like a room in your house, the effects are even greater. This does not do your hearing any favors.

Picture the worst case. Some bad guy is breaking into your house, and you are going for your home defense gun. Whether it is a handgun or a long gun does not really matter for this scenario. You arm yourself and carry out your home defense plan.

Sidenote: hopefully you have gotten some training for home defense and understand the foolishness of racing around looking for trouble if it is unnecessary to leave a position of power. If you have kids or someone else in the home to protect, things change, but if it is just you, plan accordingly.

Moving on. The worst case happens, and you are forced to fire your gun. Unlike in the movies, where the threat flies through an adjacent wall and expires after a single shot, the threat does not stop. You end up needing to shoot more than once. Another possibility is that the home invader is also armed with a gu,n and there is an exchange of fire.

Tell me, how are your ears doing? Can you really hear anything going on around you, including other potential bad guys?

How Loud Is It Indoors? Gunshot Noise Explained

Noise amplification in an enclosed space can be major. In larger rooms like your living room or den, sounds experience echo and reverberation as they bounce off surfaces. Sound distribution is uneven, and lower frequencies, like those you get with gunshots, become overly amplified. Gunshots indeed produce both low and high frequency sounds; that low frequency boom occurs when the shot is initially fired, with the higher frequency happening almost instantaneously as the bullet travels faster than the speed of sound. It all happens fast, and it is loud.

Interestingly, standard household stuff like furniture and curtains help absorb noise. The level of sound absorption they provide is not great, but it does exist. This is not your sign to become a hoarder, just a random detail.

If you fire that shot or shots in a smaller room, the noise is even greater. The way that sound is amplified in a small room involves rapid reflections, which basically means the sound bounces back faster because the walls are closer. In a hallway. Even louder.

When you are at an outdoor range, you mostly hear the direct sound the gun makes. But if you are inside your house, you get both direct sound and the effects of the reverberant field that reflects off the walls. The decibels produced by the gunshot are unchanged, but your ear’s perception of them is negatively impacted.

Indoor Gunfire Hurts More Than Hearing. It Disorients

Shots fired in your house are not only loud or deafening, but they can also be incredibly disorienting. There is also pain and tinnitus to consider, some immediate, some delayed. Speaking as someone who has had a 300 BLK carbine fired right by their head, I can attest to the pain from sound alone. The good news is that the adrenaline dump you experience can temporarily protect you from some of that. The bad news is if you become disoriented for whatever reason, it gets a lot more challenging to defend your life.

Adrenaline is a miraculous thing in life-or-death situations because it can give you the wherewithal to save the pain and trauma for later. That does not mean your hearing is not permanently damaged, though. You just will not notice until the adrenaline fades, and even then, it takes time for the full loss to hit you. Initial hearing loss is instant, but you get the oddly muffled, underwater sound plus ringing for anywhere from hours to days after the fact. Years ago, I had to fire a .40 Smith & Wesson in an enclosed space without hearing protection, and it was several hours before that initial oomph of loss subsided. This period of time, where sounds are muffled and tinnitus gets going, is called a temporary threshold shift, TTS.

Permanent hearing loss can occur instantly in these situations with what is known as acute acoustic trauma. It is also possible your hearing will seem to recover and go back to normal, but you will end up finding out what frequencies were damaged when your ears start ringing at random.

Yes, it is better to be alive and partially deaf than to be dead with your hearing intact. But why can you stay alive while also protecting your hearing? You can.

Get A Suppressor That Fits Your Setup

Putting a suppressor on your home defense gun does not have to involve a ridiculously long model that is hard to maneuver. Countless sizes and designs exist on the market today, meaning you could get a modular model that allows you to shorten it for a handgun but leave it longer on a rifle. Suppressors are available for dedicated calibers, multiple calibers, and even shotguns, and the SilencerCo Salvo 12 is modular, so you can shorten that one.

The ideal home defense setup might be an SBR with a suppressor tucked into the handguard, but that is not possible for everyone. It is not cheap. What you can do is use a carbine with a suppressor, keeping overall length down and protecting your hearing to the best of your ability. This might mean acquiring a larger safe so you can store the gun with the suppressor mounted to it, but it is doable. If you prefer handguns, they can be suppressed as well. Again, figure out how to store it until it is needed, because you do not need to be standing there in your underwear putting a suppressor on while the home invader comes around the corner.

While the addition of a suppressor on your home defense gun is not a guarantee of perfect hearing, because this is not Hollywood, it does significantly reduce the decibel level. Protecting your hearing during a home invasion might seem like a small matter, but it is not. Keeping your hearing intact helps protect your awareness and focus during the incident itself, not to mention how valuable it is after the fact.

Consider getting a suppressor as part of your home defense plan. It matters more than you might realize.

Visit Silencer Central for a look at various brands and models of suppressors.

Pros And Cons Of A Suppressor For Home Defense

• Pros: Lower blast and concussion indoors, better awareness under stress, easier communication, less risk of instant hearing damage, and modular options for pistols and carbines.
• Cons: Added length and weight, cost and paperwork in some jurisdictions, storage considerations, possible point of impact shift that requires zero confirmation.