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Comment by gmiller123456 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people use silencers on their home defense guns. Firing a gun with no hearing protection is a pretty jarring experience, and a suppressor can help quite a bit with that.

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Does it make the laser "piow" noise in real life too? Or that's just the cinema effect

The stuff that's mimicked in movies would probably be something like a silenced 22 short round or maybe a subsonic 22LR round. The primary noise of a gun is the bullet breaking the sound barrier, the secondary noise is the actual powder burning. You can absorb some of that with a suppressor but if you shoot a round that goes faster than the speed of sound, you'll still get an audible and identifiable 'crack'

A hand gun round will usually run you about 145-160db. There's a lot of variation here like barrel length, load, all of which influence speed which is also a factor. Take 30db off that with a suppressor and you're still looking at over 100db and maybe even over 120db which is the hearing loss range.

At best, a suppressor brings the sound from 'hearing loss' to 'quite loud' for normal rounds.

For a subsonic 22 round you're looking at something like 60-70db, take 20-30db off that and you get that sound that you hear in movies.

They are no where near as quiet as movies would have you believe. There are a lot of factors that come in to play as to how quiet they are, like if you're using sub-sonic ammo, the size of the supressor, barrel length, what the bullet hits, and more.

Sadly, I'm sure a lot of their regulation has to do with how they're portrayed in movies rather than reality.

No, it goes KABANG (instead of KABLAAAAAANG).

There are a ton of YouTube videos of people testing this, they’re usually a pretty fun watch.

Usually with no DB measurement. I couldn't find a single video of someone using silenced subsonic rounds with a decibel meter.

There’s a reason for that! Standard dB meters that most YouTubers have easy access to simply aren’t accurate enough for guns, even suppressed ones.

A cinema effect, which is why they’re usually called suppressors. It lowers the decibel level of the sound enough that you can fire without ear protection and not risk damage to your hearing.

Depends on the weapon and ammunition used. With subsonic ammunition silenced pistols can get pretty silent.

I think I remember some combination that did sound surprisingly similar to the movie effect, but I don't know which one.

Not sure why this is being downvoted - it's true.

You're not going to get a centerfire rifle to be "Hollywood quiet", no matter what you do. You can get a .22 rimfire rifle or pistol down to the level that it sounds like an airgun.

... but it sounds like an airgun because it has about the same energy as an airgun.

> Firing a gun with no hearing protection is a pretty jarring experience

That's perfect UX for the use case

If an intruder breaks into your home, (seemingly easily) overpowers you, and begins doing horrible things to your wife and wife's son, would you still have such a negative opinion about guns?

And the statistics on that are? Also if it's the police doing it, you're not allowed to defend yourself even if they don't announce/identify themselves.

> Also if it's the police doing it, you're not allowed to defend yourself even if they don't announce/identify themselves.

You are allowed, it's just that they are allowed to kill you if you do.

> You are allowed, it's just that they are allowed to kill you if you do.

To be fair, in practice, they are allowed to kill you if you don't, too, they are just more likely to avail themselves of being allowed to if you defend yourself.

I like how you all are talking about this, when the number of people killed by police each year is in the hundreds, while the number of people who are assaulted every year by random strangers is in the hundreds of thousands.

I find the concept of being killed by someone who was allowed to do that more offensive than the concept of being killed, much less assaulted, by someone who wasn't. Neither is a realistic threat. On the other hand, we can easily change what's allowed.

>neither is a realistic threat

tell that to the 450,000 women raped every year?

Not sure why you are comparing police killings to non-police assaults, except to make sure that the comparison is as irrelevant as possible.

Solely because the data you are suggesting (very wrongly) doesn't exist.

Anyway, the point is you are way more likely to be a victim of rape/burglary in your own home than you are to be killed by police anywhere, for any reason.

The previous poster was making it seem like dealing with this edge case is very important, meanwhile is happens somewhere around 1k-10k times less frequently than the situation I presented.

You're also more likely to be a victim of rape in your own home than you are to be injured by a table saw.

Should table saws include any safety mechanisms?

>also if it's the police

"and the statistics on that are"? Well, in that scenario I'll be doing the same thing and I will have to let my lawyer and public opinion get me out of jail

Now, for the question you've asked me: there are 2.5 million burglaries/home invasions in the USA per year. 25% of these occur when someone is at home. Quite interestingly, there are 450,000 rapes per year in the USA as well, which lines up quite scarily with the above number.

If someone is in my home, I'm not going to rely on my kung fu to save my family, who are depending on me for their protection.

> and wife's son

holup

It's a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-wifes-son

You’ve just described a scenario in which one wouldn’t care if the gun had a silencer or not, so I think you’ve failed to make your point, whatever it was.

I'm not pro-gun and do not own any, but if I had to fire a gun in that instance I sure would prefer my ears to be able to tell me if there were someone else in another room shortly after the fact.

No, it would be nice to have a silencer in this situation actually, since I will be letting off around 15 shots into that person's chest, at about 162 dB each time.

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