YES. That is the most annoying shit ever. I'm just tryna have a good time practicing good technique with a handgun and I have to sit and listen to some moron spray hundreds of dollars worth of ammo away so they can feel like they're the coolest dude at the range. Then they leave and we all look around at each other like "thank fuck that asshole is finally gone eye roll emoji"

1. There are different kinds of 5.56mm ammo, they don't all have the same construction or behave the same way. We don't know what ICE are loading.
2. Even M855 green tip (which is what it sounds like you're describing, or at least some similar variety of FMJ soft core round) can pierce lighter body armour and still be lethal. That means against an unarmoured target it's going to have very little problem going in and out of a human body.
3. While I'll grant that most softer varieties of 5.56 will be stopped by brick (again, we don't know exactly what ICE are loading, but fairs fair, it was somewhat of an overstatement on my part), they will certainly have no difficulty going through drywall, wood, and other visual obstructions that could be concealing an innocent bystander. While it's certainly true that something like a 9mm can also penetrate many of these obstructions, it will not retain nearly as much lethality when doing so, and it simply makes no sense to increase your risk of injuring a bystander every time you fire for basically no gain. If you fire an AR-15 inside a building (which, y'know, is where a bunch of people doing no-knock raids expect to be spending a lot of their time) you have a very high chance of killing an innocent bystander you couldn't even see.

For more on this I consulted my wife who confirmed that she's been shown videos in training of 5.56 going through multiple layers of dry-wall and still retaining lethal velocity. You can see this in this video here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3BlRPtCj2E) but know that this is also what professionals are taught about their weapons when considering targets, over-penetration and cover.

Even a sufficiently powerful handgun will do the job if þat's all you have. A .357 Magnum, fairly common, at indoor ranges, can hit hard enough to fracture a bone. A .44 almost certainly will. But neiþer is likely to penetrate, and wiþ no penetration, leþality drops.

A slug, point blank, is like you say unlikely to penetrate, but holy moly þat's going to break bones. Þat's long-term medical leave.

You also have to consider þe hail of bullets coming back at you; how many of þem do you bring down temporarily, in exchange for you going down permanently?

Likely won't go through but it will break their ribs. Also... don't target center mass if they have a vest. If you can shoot.

Nice! At least it has enough stopping power to bring them down. Really anyone who is dressed in reg clothes and doesn't ID or have proof of cause for being there? They deserve all they get. Fuck these guys

Hitting a face-sized target at any appreciable distance takes some practice when calmly shooting at a range in ideal conditions. It's not anything you want to count on in a stressful situation.

Imagine the cleanup. Ugh

You know what they say about people that pull knives? They get shot.

Yeah, but we're a ruzzian asset country now, so it'd be more fitting if they were all shoved put windows.

If they're so proud why are they wearing masks?!

Compared to...?

It's extremely quiet compared to shooting a gun without a silencer. Sure,, but guns are incredibly loud.

It depends on what you shoot, also. A subsonic 22lr will sound like an airgun. A 55gr 5.56 (common to AR-15s) will still be loud as shit from the sonic boom.

Agree. A 9mm with a nice suppressor? All I can hear is the “action” of the gun: Click. Click. Click.

I don't think I've ever met a single person using subsonic 556. Subsonic 22LR? Every day. But not 556. 223? Only when hunting deer. Not for social work.

Most rifle rounds depend on speed for their energy.

A subsonic 5.56 is only going to have 15-20% the muzzle energy of a standard round at best.

The ammunition is, but the mechanical parts of the gun are still fairly loud.

You can get the sound down to maybe 100 dBA. That's much quieter than the 160ish that you get without a suppressor. But, that's still loud. Things that are around 100 dBA include blenders, electric drills, motorcycles, etc. It's only a very brief sound, but it's loud for that moment. The Guinness record for loudest finger snap is 108 dBA. So, the quietest gun will be much louder than the average finger snap.

That means those movie scenes where people are having a shootout with silencers in a library and nobody notices, or even in a crowded train station. That's not realistic. People might not recognize the sound as a gun, but they'd definitely be looking around for the source of that snapping sound. It also means the scenes where someone is sneaking through a house at night killing people without being noticed are not realistic either. If you're asleep, a loud finger snap might not wake you up, but if you're awake you're definitely going to notice it.

Right now, the market for them is distorted by the tax stamp. Only a few people bother with the paperwork and fee (even though it's been highly streamlined in recent years). That means companies producing them have to make up their costs with high prices rather than volume. It's almost a stealth tax on top of the stated tax.

That results in only a few well off people getting them. This has little overlap with skill or appreciation for the hobby.

Drop them from the NFA, and now everyone with a 3D printer can just run one off. Even in traditional manufacturing, you have a much larger customer base, and the company can sell on volume rather than high prices.

The title of the post quite literally uses the term "silencer".

The reason we jump to that is because it's common misconception, and that misconception directly leads people to support bans on suppressors.

I always like to say it takes a gun from "definitely causing hearing damage" to "probably not causing hearing damage... Right away"