Welcome to gun owners of America, state of the second podcast.

I'm Kayleigh.

And I'm John.

And today we're joined by Robert from Tennessee.

Silencer Robert.

How are you today?

I'm doing good.

How about you guys?

Good.

Now we're gonna start from the beginning.

Let's get the origin story of the company, a little bit about yourself and what you all do.

Sure.

So we're in East Tennessee, in Seymour, Tennessee.

Pretty rural place, but we're a little bit south of Knoxville.

But as far as I can tell, we're the biggest silencer sales place in Tennessee.

Um, we have an outdoor test range, so you can actually come out and try silencers, see what they hear, like on your own gun before you.

Before you purchase one.

That's kind of our specialty.

We have all the fingerprinting machines.

We can do people's silencer paperwork in like 1520 minutes if we have an assembly line.

But we also rent machine guns.

We have an outdoor shooting range.

We sell night vision.

We kind of specialize in all the stuff that most other gun stores don't.

Yeah, to test fire a suppressor before you get to buy it.

That's unheard of.

Most company, most ranges and retailers do not allow it.

Or maybe they've got a 22 can in a nine mil can that's sitting on the range.

That's kind of a really cool selling point that you guys have.

So you guys deal with a lot of NFA items.

That's the bulk of our business.

So, like, as far as stuff that we sell, it's probably the, I would say class three items, NFA items, whatever you want to call them.

It's probably 80% of what we do.

So if you could go over what that all means, NFA, and get stuff.

The NFA is the National Firearms act, and it was passed in 1934, back when all the bank robbery stuff, everybody was seeing Tommy guns in the movie.

Dillinger made his little 1911, full auto, and Congress basically decided that they were gonna do away with machine guns, anything that they didn't like at the time.

So coincidentally, all those guns were stolen from the us government.

But anyway, Congress decided that they were gonna pass the National Firearms act.

It was the first real gun control act, and so it set up this tier of guns.

We call it class three items most of the time.

Now, National Firearms act is actually NFA items is better descriptor, but it's silencers, short barrel rifles, short barrel shotguns, aows, or any other weapons.

Destructive devices, which destructive devices are like cannons, rocket propelled grenade launchers.

Anything bigger than a half inch bore cannons is the best.

Or grenade launchers, potentially.

And then there's one more I'm missing.

Currency silencer, short rail rifles, short rail shotguns, dds, aows, maybe.

I got them all.

Yeah.

An AOW can be anything.

It's anything that doesn't fit another category.

So it could be a pen gun.

It could be a handgun that's in a holster that makes it look like something else that's been ruled in AOW.

The original intent was that aows were gonna be handguns.

So when the NFA was passed, handguns were NFA.

And I, it's never really been, there was a bunch of court cases and settlements and stuff, and it's never really been enforced.

But technically, according to the NFA, handguns qualify as well.

Yeah, that's a big attack that they've tried for years, is going after handguns.

They deem them this scary thing, which nowadays we're all like, well, I doubt anybody in this room doesn't have a handgun that either they own or carry daily.

So there's extra restrictions on anything in FAe.

You have to, right now, you have to be fingerprinted, you have to have a submit a photograph.

And there is a registry.

So that's the biggest difference is that, like, if you buy a regular, a 1022 rifle or some sort of rifle or shotgun, there's, depending on your state, you may have a registry.

But like in Tennessee, we have a background check system.

You gotta be background checked.

But after the background check is done, there's no official list of where all that stuff is.

It can be traced to, you know, if the gun's using a crime, you can go back and figure out where it came from.

But the NFA, there is an actual NFA list.

And that's got where all the, all these things are supposed to be.

You know, who owns them and where they are.

And I think the idea was, well, back in the day, there's not very many of these.

And so they're like, we'll have this list.

We'll know who the scary guys in town are.

If something happens with a silencer, we'll know whose door to go knock on.

And originally it was $200.

It could have also been considered, effectively a ban because $200 in 1934 was crazy money.

Well, well, more, I think a Model T was like $200 back in the day.

So over time, $200 has gotten to be, I hate to say, reasonable, but it's gotten to be affordable, let's say.

And so their popularity has gone through the roof.

Yeah.

I mean, in the last decade, decade and a half, we've seen this new resident renaissance into suppressors and NFA items.

You know, OSHA recommends the use of suppressors when you're shooting.

So it's funny that one government organization says, yes, you should do this.

And the other one's like, no, you should pay for it.

So, yeah, now, right now we're seeing the tax stamps come back at record times, which is insane, because normally you would buy a suppressor and then it would wait there at the shop, and you get to go get conjugal visits with it every once in a while, depending on the shop.

And now you're, it's what, two, three day turnaround?

Yeah.

So it's hard to answer this question because we still have some people who are still taking six months.

I mean, I had, I've had some customers.

Their stuff has taken, has taken like a year in the last, you know, like in the last week, we've delivered, uh, we've, we've, we've had people pick up silencers that were a year, five months, four months, two months, two days, one day.

We had one dude get his.

He bought it at like five in the evening, uh, right before we closed, and his approval came in the next morning.

So it's, it started, they started speeding up, I would say, in the fall, started getting, maybe this time two years ago, a year was a normal wait time.

And it's traditionally gone up and down, depending on how many people were buying.

You would get kind of a slingshot, say, when I started doing the store eight or nine years ago, we'd have a period where short.

We'd get short wait times.

Everybody and their brother would buy at the same time, and then that would extend the wait times.

And then you'd have.

The wait times would get really long and it would kind of go back and forth, but they're consistently getting shorter right now.

So I used to have this huge room in the back that we would store silencers, and we'd have several thousand back there.

And on average, we probably have an 8th of what we had a year ago back there.

It's not because we're selling less, we're selling more.

They're just getting approved so much faster, on average.

Well, it's crazy because the big Theory was for years it was like, okay, cool.

So.

And says paperwork got in faster.

It's because they was literally a pile of paperwork sitting on some bureaucrats desk that if you were whatever, where you were in here.

If there more came in, more got put on top of it.

And it was just a ridiculous.

Yeah.

Amount of theory, but it was.

It was all paper.

Five years ago, there was.

There was.

E farms has been in construction for, like, almost two decades.

But, you know, we were submitting all paper five years ago until they started to incrementally open up eforms.

But, you know, my understanding is there were in West Virginia, where in Martinsburg is where all the National Firearms act is.

And it's.

It's like a huge airplane hangar size complex where they do all this stuff, and, you know, you would see pictures from the place, and there's just filing.

Filing boxes full of paperwork that they were getting shuffled around, you know, literally tons and tons of paperwork, applications waiting.

And now, you know, a few months.

A few months ago, we saw eforms go down, and then all of a sudden, e forms went back up.

And the wait period has January, maybe.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, the wait period seemed to cut in half overnight.

Yeah.

Do you have a reason why you think this happened?

I have guesses.

I know that just from talking to friends in law enforcement and stuff, a bunch of the background check related systems went down around the same time.

I know, like, law enforcement uses NCIC.

When e farms went down, a bunch of the other stuff went down.

So it could be partially that there's some larger efficiency happening at the FBI's background check office.

There's theories that it's political.

There's a lot of court cases about silencers right now and whether they should be, you know, regulated like the Texas lawsuit.

So it could be that this has just always been ATF's plan, and they, you know, they're finally getting around to making these things faster.

It could be that they're worried that they're about to lose their authority if they don't make it reasonable to buy silencers.

That's kind of my theory, because if you're trying to argue that you should, it's a very reasonable regulation.

It's only $200, and they only take a few days versus.

Yeah, I mean, it takes 16 months to get a silencer.

No big deal.

That's very reasonable.

You know, when I first started going to gun shows, trying to sell silencers in this area a few years ago, like, half the people I talked to thought silencers were illegal.

And now most of the people who shoot a lot either have a silencer or are probably planning on getting one.

You know, I would say at least majority in this area.

At least.

So for one thing, you know, one of the things when I started was my argument was, like, my goal, my sort of mission statement was, I'm gonna sell so many silencers that the ATF can't keep track of them anymore and they'll voluntarily give it up, you know, so that their, their end of this is they're having to get more efficient at it, probably, or else they won't be able to keep track of it.

You know, your local courthouse keeps track of all the cars registered.

That's another registry that we use.

And you think about how many people are involved in that, how many man hours to keep track of all that.

The ATF only has one office to do the whole country.

There's a lot more silencers than there are, you know, car registrations changing hands now.

So.

So let's kind of get into the myths that you hear.

I know you said that when you first started, a lot of people thought they were illegal.

Oh, yeah.

You can't own one of those.

So what are kind of the myths or the biggest questions that you get at your shop?

So I don't get as much as I used to, but for a while, people used to think that as soon as you owned an NFA item, silencer, or whatever, that that basically gave the government a blank check to come check your house.

You know, like, you lose your fourth amendment rights to own a silencer, which is not true.

I think the reason that people.

I think the reason that myth came to be is during the original assault weapons ban, the only way you were going to be able to get a silencer was to get an FFL and get an sot like I've got.

And if you.

If you have an FFL, the ATF can come audit you.

And they don't have to warn you, they can just show up.

We want to see what you got.

Where are the books and that kind of thing?

As an individual citizen, if you own stuff on a form four, they're going to need a warrant, just like anything else, to come talk to me.

And they could come ask.

You wouldn't have to let them in, though.

There's nothing stopping somebody from coming and saying, hey, I want to come.

I want to see your silencers.

Would you mind showing it to me?

But they cannot just come in without some sort of court order.

And they're going to have to provide evidence and have a reason, you know, so you don't have, you don't you still have your fourth Amendment rights with a silencer?

We also have people who ask like, they assume, I guess, that silencers are like they're somehow going to lose their silencer, or their family's gonna lose their silencer after they pass away, which is not true.

So I can go into the inheritance thing if you want?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I've had some customers been in business now long enough where I've had quite a few customers pass away.

And there's some different ways to handle it, but a lot of people think, anyway, a lot of people think that you just, I guess the county, the sheriff comes and gets it or something.

But silencers are inheritable tax free.

When you pay that dollar 200 tax to get your silencer, that's for the silencer, and it includes inheritance.

So if I have a silencer and I pass away, if it's registered to me as an individual, Robert Ware, at such and such address, then essentially it's gonna pass down like a car would.

Whoever your will says gets it is gonna get it.

Or if you don't have a will, then whoever the judge says gets it gets it.

So if you have a silencer, you should have a will.

If it's registered individual.

That's my little PSA for the day.

Cause if you don't, it makes it a lot more difficult.

You can also register them in a trust.

We have a lot.

We have tons of people registering trusts.

There's some pros and cons there we could go into, if you want.

But make a long story short, as long as you have a will, or as long as your heirs are willing to do the paperwork, it's a form five.

They don't have to pay the tax.

It's basically a one page form.

They just say it's coming from this person at this address.

The reason is he passed.

It's coming to me.

And the only downside is, as an individual, whoever inherits it has to do fingerprints and a picture as though they were buying one.

It doesn't involve a gun store or anything like that.

They just send it off to ATF.

And traditionally, those have gone faster than form fours.

So, like, when we were on paper forms, form fours would typically take from my store to a customer somewhere from six to 16 months, depending on the year.

And form five, which is the tax free, would typically take like six weeks.

So ATF has traditionally made those go faster because they want people to do the system.

They don't want people to just, you know, do nothing.

That's an option.

There's a.

The registry's got tons of, you know, bad allocated soundsters.

Probably nobody's ever done anything.

You know, maybe they just got thrown in the trash.

Nobody knows where they are.

So we have, you know, we talked about how they're speeding up, and there's, there's this system in place that they don't want to lose.

And we've got the, which was previously called the Hearing Protection act.

Now it's called the shush act, correct.

I think it went shush, then hearing protection.

It went shush.

And hearing Protection act is now on the floor again.

It's been, this has been talked about since, what, 2016?

So it's been a long time coming.

Do you think that there's a more of a push now that this is going to be going through, or is this just something that we're going to still be waiting on?

So Joe Biden's president right now.

I don't expect anything to happen while he's president.

Right.

So when the Hearing Protection act was first introduced into Congress and they were really lobbying it hard, my argument at the time was, maybe this isn't the right time for this.

Obama was still president.

He had plenty of years left.

And so I just didn't see it passing.

And the other thing that's important to know about silencer ownership is that in the past, say, 20 years, ownership of silencers has doubled every four years.

So by my math, that means that pretty much everybody who owns a gun is probably going to own a silencer about ten ish years from now.

Okay, so my vote would have probably been to wait until we have all three house, you know, both houses and a president, and then push it when there is inevitably so many silencers, there's already, like this, you know, stronger call for it.

So, like, we're getting pretty close right now.

Tons of people have silencers.

So I would say it has much more chance of passing than it ever has.

My personal opinion is that, you know, just from a strategic standpoint, let's say, when we get to the point where pretty much everybody who owns a gun has a silencer, it's a shoe in, you know, I mean, as of today, you know, Joe Jovine's probably not signing it, would be my guess.

Well, and the argument has always been, I mean, they've gone after the, what they would call the assault weapons ban in AWB, and we got one that AR 15s were in common use.

So at this point, if, if you're.

Number, soundsters are getting pretty close to common use.

Yeah, soundsters are getting pretty close to common use.

So that would, that kind of makes sense that they would, if the ruling on that would come down, it'd be instant, almost.

Yeah.

So there's a, I think there's a couple of other pieces to the puzzle.

The first is, you know, you have to apply force in Congress, and that force comes in the.

Yeah, that force comes through activism.

Right.

It's political activism.

And so a lot of people will go, well, why are you introducing this or why are you pushing this when Obama is president, when Biden is the president?

And the truth is you get it.

So you have people on the record.

Yes.

And this way, if people need to be voted out of office because they don't sponsor it or they don't vote for it, you can get your house in order and know where people stand on the record.

That makes total sense.

And so that's one of those reasons why you're seeing it introduced and reintroduced every congress.

So that's one piece of the puzzle.

The second piece of the puzzle actually comes in the form of the hunting community and showing that states are more open to the use of suppressors.

Getting suppressors legal for hunting use in as many states as humanly possible, again, helps apply that pressure because they're wanting to see that their constituents are holding them accountable on something.

And so state legislatures are incredibly important, and what gets passed there are incredibly important.

And so love or hate the hunting community or not, you know, that that's an individual's choice.

But there is a hunting component to this and why we are seeing the push being stronger, you know, this time than it was the last time.

And hopefully, and it's going to be stronger every year.

Yeah.

You know, every four years.

Silencer ownership, it will probably continue to double.

It's still continued to double since I've been doing it.

So the number of people willing to write Congress over it in four years will probably be double what it is right now.

Um, so, you know, like you said, trying to get people on the record, that's a good record to be on.

You want to be the first.

You probably want to be the first to get on that, that train rather than waiting until the, the bitter end, be the last guy on.

No, I don't disagree.

I mean, that's the pressure.

The political pressure is, is huge.

And it's a point that we need to push is that the, you know, vote the right people in who will push for the things that you want.

And Congress, we've talked about this before, that congress and our representatives work for us.

So if we continue to put pressure on them to vote the way we want them to vote.

That's really what we need to be doing.

The other thing is silencers.

So, like, you know, we haven't got hearing Protection act federally.

Tennessee had our own, I think they even called it the Hearing Protection act.

So Tennessee now has no laws about silencers.

You know, my license comes from federal government, so they're still federally, federally regulated.

But, you know, state police, any state, bonded officers, they don't have the ability, they don't have the same ability to go after you for a silencer like they could before or whatever.

And the reason for that, people were like, why are we passing this one?

Um, the federal government still has them illegal as a waste of time.

Well, it's a, you know, we know we'll win the fight now in Tennessee.

If Human Protection act ever did pass federally, Tennessee's already ready for it and they're legal in 43 states now.

That's a fairly new environment, you know, fairly new thing.

I mean, um, I think when I started, they were legal in like 34 states or 40, maybe.

Yeah, it, it was something, it was in the thirties.

So there's, there's been, there's been a lot of progress, put it that way.

Yeah.

And it's those incremental moves that make it harder to ignore.

Right.

Because it also allows for more.

We talk a lot about the industry and the things that affect the industry.

Well, pent up demand, because you couldn't own something that is going to help increase that number of people that do own that and are, and are able to use suppressors.

And that's a huge thing.

And that's such a nice thing for people.

Because if OSHA is going to say, hey, you need to use this because it's good for your hearing, to protect your hearing and to make it safer to shoot again, it's adding another pressure point.

Osha isn't going to change the law.

But that is quite the arrow in our quiver in this fight.

Right?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, look at Texas.

You know, Texas passed a law that any suppressor manufactured in Texas is legal for purchase, if I'm not mistaken.

Something similar around that.

Yes, they kind of went further than, I'm not an expert on the Texas law, but my understanding is they went, they kind of went.

So Tennessee basically just, we don't have any laws on silencers.

No pros, no cons, silencers or chainsaws in Tennessee.

As far as the state goes, Texas kind of went a step further and said, silencers are protected in Texas.

You know, like the federal government, you know, as far as Texas is concerned, you know, this is a right or something.

Yeah.

So the key piece that legislation, if I'm not mistaken, was, let me think, it's 2024.

So that would have been in the 2022 when Texas got constitutional carry.

And the main thing that that bill did is it gave essentially some teeth for their ag to sue on behalf of citizens to get suppressors out of the NFA if that ag would choose to go after, after them.

And so the, the way that it was written, and a lot of people, because of, you know, we live in a great day and age where anything can be branded as anything.

So a lot of people thought, well, you can just buy any, any silencer made in Texas.

And there, there were no laws.

It was the Wild west.

That wasn't the case.

But what the bill did is it provided protection and gave the ag the ability to do lawsuits on behalf of the citizenry and saying basically the right second amendment argument.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so that was how that bill was worded.

And I think that's why you're seeing so many cases when it comes to silencers.

And getting them out of the NFA, kind of basing themselves in Texas is for that reason.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I'd love to see more states do this.

We see a lot of, right now, we're seeing a big movement of states rights over the federal government, and we've seen a lot of states switch over to constitutional carrier now, 29, which is fantastic.

We'd love to see more.

And that.

Cause that also helps with the argument with national carry and national reciprocity that we've had, we've talked about before.

But having the ability to sue on behalf of your citizens is fantastic, especially on an item that is approved by OSHA and that we're seeing more and more people get into common use.

Well, the other, the other alternative is for a lawsuit against the federal government for your second amendment rights would be like, I got arrested.

You know, somebody gets arrested for having a silencer, let's say.

And now their argument, that's a tough one, because all the laws, all the penalties for anything, National Firearms act are all pretty harsh.

They're federal time.

Most of them are like ten years or $100,000 fine or both or something like that.

So having an attorney general make that fight is way better than making your second amendment fight in court.

Well, and yourself.

The thing is, is that they're going after law abiding citizens.

When we see in cities like Chicago and other inner cities where the crime is high that they've got switches.

And, you know, for the, you know, what I'm referring to for switches is a Glock switch.

We know that those are illegal under the NFA, and they're everywhere now.

And it's sad that the people who are following the law and may not know are getting crucified the most in court and made an example while others are just getting a slap on the wrist.

Yeah, well, that's just the way that the cookie crumbles right now.

They would much rather vilify the law abiding than to vilify the people who are actually committing crimes that, you know, it's crazy when you look at places like Chicago, when you look at gun free zones in general.

I mean, that's where the mass murders happen because they've made it a soft target.

And yet somehow it is always the gun's fault.

And it's not the criminals who are taking advantage of these laws.

It's.

It's horrible.

Well, like you said, they vilify the gun.

I mean, they don't honor the people who have, who have taken the.

They don't, you know, they, they don't honor the people who have stopped crime.

I mean, look at Texas.

The woman went in to go shoot up the church, and armed security guard stopped that story, went in and out of the news cycle faster than I could turn my head.

And instead of, you know, showing how a armed citizen saved a bunch of people's lives, they went and, you know, went after the gun.

But since it didn't fit their narrative, it went so fast in and out of the news cycle, you know, no, nobody really got a chance to attack it.

So back to the NF.

Sorry.

Soap bugs there.

So let's circle back to talking about suppressors and things like that.

A lot of people have a lot of questions.

So the one that I've also heard is a big rumor is going, traveling with a suppressor.

So what is it like to travel with a suppressor?

Bad, as people say, do you have to make.

There was, you know, talk of you had to make phone calls to local law enforcement before you traveled, things like that.

Is that true or is.

It'S more complicated than driving around with a shotgun, but it's not much more.

So they're legal in 43 states.

You can take a silencer to any state that they're legal.

Silencers don't require a travel form, but some of the other NFA items do.

So, you know, if you are going to go, I'm in Tennessee.

If I was going to go hog hunting in Arkansas, let's say, to take a silencer with a gun I legally own and everything, I just go.

There's no permission asked or anything.

If I wanted to take a short barrel rifle, though, or short barrel shotgun or a machine gun or a destructive device, cannon, whatever those you do have to ask, you have to send in a.

We call it, we call it travel form.

It's a 5320.20 is the actual form, form 20, and it's a one page form.

You say what you want to send or what you're taking with you, how it's getting there, and then you have a date range.

The date range can be a maximum of one year.

So you could, you could, if you have, like, somebody, say you have a relative, your parents live in another state, and you like to go visit and bring your guns so you can shoot at their farm or whatever, you can fill out a form 20 on January 1 that goes from January 1 to December 31.

And you can do that every year.

But typically there's a date range.

I'm going to be there from here to here.

And then you file it.

And I think you're supposed to give them like two weeks.

You won't usually hear anything back, but you have to send it and give it their time.

And then I don't know what they do with them, but that's how the law, it was in the law in the thirties because I thought that was going to be important.

So it is technically a requirement.

I don't know of anybody who's.

I've never heard of anybody getting in trouble for it, but, you know, doesn't mean there hasn't been.

Well, then that brings up a follow up question.

You know, a lot, we've seen a lot of people move around in the last couple of years.

What's it like to, if you move with an NFA item, you know, if.

You move in state, you technically don't have to do anything.

I still tell people the form 20 takes like 510 minutes.

Fill it out and send it in.

Then you don't have to worry about it.

If you change states, it's just like anything else, traveling or whatever.

It's the same form.

Fill it out.

And then instead of saying, you know, I'm going to be here from this date to this date, there's another different box that says permanent change of address.

And then ideally you do that.

You're supposed to do it before you move.

Usually what happens is people forget, you know, and then they're doing it like the day they're moving or whatever.

ATF is mostly going to be concerned that they know the right address.

You know, nobody's going to, I don't think they're going to go after you for being a day late on your travel form.

They're mostly just going to be happy.

You're keeping the registry up to date.

Yeah.

And then you have to.

The other thing with suppressors and sbRs, if I'm not mistaken, but they have to have engraving on them, or does that.

So silencers don't, you know, we don't have to engrave silencers.

Silencers all have engraving on them from the manufacturer, just like all guns make, model, serial number, caliber.

And so the confusion there is.

So we have a laser engrave at our store, for example.

And if you wanted to SBR, if you want to take a rifle, an Air 15, let's say, and you want to put a ten inch barrel on it or something, anything less than 16 inches, that would make it a NFA item, you'd file your form one, which is like a permission to do it yourself if you don't have a license.

And once it comes back, you need to engrave your manufacturer's information.

And people are like, well, this already says it already has manufacturer on it and all that stuff.

So once you make it yourself, make it yourself.

Once you file the paperwork to make your form one, you're considered the new manufacturer.

So you're going to have the old manufacturer's info and then you're going to add yours.

Usually it's not that big a deal, though.

Like, let's say we have a, we have an AR 15 that's got make, model, serial number, caliber.

You know, we're almost always going to use the original model, the original caliber.

The original serial number.

Caliber may change if you're going to put go from 5.56 to 300, blackout or something.

You really only have to engrave what changes.

So typically it's going to be name, city, and state, and then maybe caliber.

So silencers.

Silencers don't need any sort of engraving.

Unless, I guess you were making one yourself, which ATF made that pretty hard to do here lately.

But you can, you can do it.

But if you, if you do a build it yourself, short barrel rifle, short barrel shotgun, something like that, it's gonna.

Get engraved with suppressors being on the NFA, there's a lot of misnomers about parts for them and things like that.

So they, they do need maintenance.

A lot of people don't understand that they need maintenance, and then sometimes you can get a baffle strike on them.

So if it is, what's the, what's the warranty look like?

If it is a, a singular baffle can versus a stackable baffle can?

And is, is there the ability to have, like, if it's a, uh, a stackable baffle can, is there the ability to have baffles sent to you to replace any strike baffles?

Yeah, so most people, because, because silencers have this $200 tax.

It's not like guns, where you, you can buy one and better one comes out in a year and you're, you can just upgrade real easily.

Most people are buying a silencer for a long, you know, plan it for the long haul, let's say, you know, trying to get a few.

So there's a lot more concern about fixing it.

Pretty much all silencers.

All of the, I would say the traditionally made silencers can be repaired.

Silencers tend to come in either the old school way of doing it would be to have a tube and then you'd have baffles inside of it and they might be welded up or they could be stacked where you could take them apart for cleaning or whatever.

And then there's, it's kind of hard to, there's like all these different types.

Let's do quick, like, let's do like rifle silencers versus 22 1st okay, so you got cleanable silencers and you've got not cleanable silencers.

Why?

And people are like, well, why would I ever want one that's, that's not cleanable?

And the short answer is calibers.

It's going to be really hard to take.

Make a silencer that can handle three, three lapua pressure and still be cleanable, the thing would have to weigh tremendous, you know, amounts of weight or whatever, because you're going to have like threaded ends on probably at least one side.

So having a welded up silencer gives you more pressure, more caliber or more, more pressure rating.

It can be lighter for the same caliber rating, let's say.

And to some extent, it can reduce the chance of a, an impact of a bullet strike.

Again, use it every day, reduce the chance of a baffle strike.

A lot of the baffle strikes we've had involve people putting together their silencers wrong.

They take apart for cleaning, put them back together and then something, you know, those, those parts in there got to be lined up perfect.

If a bullet touches anything in there and it's going 3000ft/second it's going to, it's going to blast stuff apart.

So, um, I think one of the main reasons you get a welded up, like a sealed silencer, is easier to build.

More pressure can, can be lighter, and that kind of thing.

But some silencers have to be take apart.

So 22 silencers are a good example.

Um, those pistol caliber silencers are usually also come apart for cleaning.

Um, 22 long rifle does not have a copper jacket.

Sometimes I have copper plating, but it's like a micron thick.

It's not going to be something that'll stay together as it's going down rifling.

So with a 22 long rifle, lead bullet, you know, it, you fire it off and it's going down the rifling.

That lead is actually melting off on the rifling as it's going down the barrel.

And behind the bullet, you've got like little droplets of liquid lead that are just teeny.

And as the bullet leaves, normally that lead will go about six, seven inches out.

They'll cool in the air and then just land on the ground someplace.

With a silencer, it's capturing all that.

It's designed to capture the explosion on the sound, and it's going to capture that little liquid lead also.

So like a 22 silencer, you can shoot, say, a couple thousand rounds.

You're, you'll notice that the silencer weighs a little bit more because it's got carbon buildup and it's got lead, little bits of lead in there.

And if you were to do that on a non cleanable silencer, the thing will eventually just fill up.

So, like a lot of the old 22 silencers before our I got into it.

I mean, even now, you'll still find some that are not disassembleable, and they kind of have a lifespan on them.

Unless you have some way of cleaning them chemically, let's say.

And another public service announcement.

I usually tell people, try not to don't clean your soundsters chemically unless you really know what you're doing.

There's some right and wrong ways to do that, and you can run into trouble.

So, as far as repairing them goes, a disassembleable silencer is pretty easy to repair.

We as end users, really are not supposed to be repairing our silencers.

If you're the manufacturer, let's say you built a silencer yourself in your garage, you're the manufacturer, you can change it however you want.

But if you, let's say I sell you a silencer, it's made by another company, that company or somebody somebody who's got a manufacturer's license is really who's supposed to fix it.

They're not just going to be able to ship you new baffles.

Okay, so you get your silencers.

The whole silencer is going to have to go back to the manufacturer.

You won't have to do any sort of crazy, long wait time paperwork to get it there.

So you could ship it to them.

And as quickly as they can fix it, they can ship it back.

You don't have to do ATF wait time and stuff again.

But ATF silencers are strange in that ATF determines that every single part in the silencer is a silencer, so they can't just send you stuff.

Makes sense.

Yeah, it makes sense.

It's kind of crazy that, you know, as simple as a baffle strike to replace that.

Baffles, especially unstackable, should be as easy as, okay, here's the strike one.

Send it off, they send you a new one.

Right.

It's weird that, you know, I could call a gun company tomorrow and send me a spring or a firing pin or whatever.

So it's crazy that you have to send the whole thing off.

Yep.

Now, we haven't talked about this yet.

What is better and what is the difference between a wet and a dry can?

Yeah.

So wet or dry isn't as much of a thing as it used to be when I first started.

Silencers.

Silencers technology has gotten a lot better over the years, but any silencer you can have, for lack of a better term, a fairly bad silencer, that's not that quiet.

And you add a little bit of water to it, and it's gonna.

You're not just getting with the water.

You're not just getting a, like a mechanical suppression, where it's capturing the air and releasing it slower.

But you're also getting, you're getting a chemical reaction.

The heat, you know, there's flame coming out of your barrel.

It hits that water or grease or, you know, low temperature oil, let's say, or high temperature burning oil.

Um, and it that that heat gets converted into steam, and that will suck a lot of that energy out of the explosion much more efficiently.

So, you know, some silencers may just have one or two baffles, but they designed them for use with lithium grease or some sort of grease or water.

Water is sort of the.

Probably the most common, just because you can find, you know, water just about anywhere.

But if you're going to have a silencer that's preloaded with the stuff and you're going to be carrying around.

You don't know where you're going to use it on a gun, let's say, then typically grease is a more common thing that used to be really popular for pistol silencers.

It's typically a pistol caliber thing, too.

So if you add water to a rifle silencer, the pressures involved are just orders of magnitude higher in rifle silencer.

So adding water to a rifle silencer is not something you want to do just for the giggles.

You really are going to have, like some sort of rating from the company.

Cause that, that could cause like a, you know, like a kaboom.

No bueno.

So pistol silencers are.

Most time are going to be rated nowadays.

Most all of them are going to be rated to use wet.

And all that means is you can add a little bit of water.

People ask how much water to add or how much grease to add to, and usually don't take very much.

I mean, you take a good pistol silencer and add, you know, you could take a dropper, let's say four or five drops will do nine millimeter pretty well for 20 or 30 rounds and 22 silencers, maybe a drop or two.

It's all you need.

And it.

And it, and it will only last, you know, depends on how much you put in there.

The more you add.

There are problems with wet silencers, though, too.

Like, the more you add, um, it can.

Because the explosion is basically inside the silencer is get.

Is you're adding steam now so the gun can run harder and stuff.

So there, you don't want to add too much.

It might make the gun run dirtier or run it harder.

If you add water to a wet silencer that's got a Nielsen device or a booster or a piston, whatever you want to call it, a lot of times you'll feel the gun kick a little harder because that Nielsen device, the explosion inside the silencer is a little bit hotter.

Yeah.

And so what, then?

What is the difference between.

So I know that you can use grease.

I know wire pulling grease is one of the, the popular one.

Wire pulling gel is essentially, my understanding is essentially water.

It's a water based gel.

And there's just like a little bit of, you know, whatever the gel medium is to keep it sort of as a more solid.

Now, the other one that people brought up is wipes.

So is that the same concept?

Wipes are essentially a rubber or rubber.

Like, imagine just like a rubber washer.

Like, you'd fix your sink with a.

And to work right, a wipe can be, either have a hole in it already, or it can just be a piece of rubber that you shoot a bullet through.

And essentially you got, you know, your.

Your wipe, the bullet is jamming its way through it and it squeezes over the bullet and the rubber closes itself right behind it.

And it's just capturing the air a lot more efficiently.

And so some cans are just only have wipes.

They don't have any metal baffles in them at all.

So is that.

Are we seeing a trend going away from wet and wipe silencers to more like, the baffle technology has probably good.

Probably, yeah.

So a lot of silencers will.

Almost all the pistol silencers will have a wet rating.

Some of them may not, but, I mean, all the ones I can think of off top of my head have a wet rating now.

But the baffles have gotten so good, they don't typically need it.

I mean, you know, if you like, some of the older monochors or silencers, just have one or two baffles.

I mean, you know, 20 years ago, a lot of silencers were.

They had like, screen door material and stuff in them.

You know, that's kind of silencer.

Running it wet is a huge difference.

But, you know, you have a pistol silencer, it's got ten or eleven cone baffles in it or k baffles or, or monocors with a whole bunch of chambers.

You probably might only see like a two or three or 4% difference in running it wet versus dry.

So, you know, if you need that extra little bit of quiet, then it's awesome.

But most of the time, most of the silencers are so quiet now, you can run them dry and probably not gonna.

May never need to run it wet.

Yeah, but that's a, that's a fairly new thing.

That's like the last four or five years thing.

Oh, yeah.

So, um, you've been in business for almost a decade at this point.

Have you seen a demographic switch or anything, like change in who is purchasing silencers?

Yes.

So the original group of dudes that I.

The most common purchaser originally, I would say, is I had lots.

I would.

When I started out, I didn't have a storefront.

I had a storefront, but I didn't really use it.

It was just an office.

It wasn't a store.

I guess I went to gun shows and we had a website, and that's kind of how I expected the business to go, because silencers were kind of a niche thing.

And so I was going to these gun shows and I would talk to people.

A lot of people were like, I don't need a silencer.

I like my guns loud.

And then you get to talking to them and you find out, well, actually, you know, they have, they live on a ten acre lot, let's say.

Then they're in the middle of the county.

But now, you know, they, you know, we used to shoot every weekend, but now we've got neighbors that are kind of nearby, so we don't shoot as often.

That is the perfect silencer customer, because getting a silencer for that guy can make shooting a Saturday between noon and three thing.

It could go from that to being, I can shoot whenever I want, you know, and go out after, after work every day and shoot five or ten rounds.

Not going to annoy anybody.

So that was my biggest client base.

And like a lot of farmers, you know, we have hog problems in Tennessee, people trying would get the Twra permits or whatever to be able to shoot hogs at nighttime.

But now it's just, I mean, the demographic is a gun owner.

You know, the other thing that's changed in the last two or three months is I used to hear all the time, like, I'm going to get a silencer, you know, if they'll ever get rid of that wait time.

Well, with a two or three day wait time now, like, anybody who's been on the fence about the wait time, like, they're, they're here, you know, if they're.

If they know what they're going to buy, we've been selling them.

The problem I see in the near future is getting enough silencers.

If the ATF keeps eforms wait time going the way they are now, all the silencer manufacturers are going to have to do a lot more production to keep up.

And I think that will continue to go up once suppressors are out of the NFA.

I think you have a lot of people that words.

I think there are a lot of people that believe, and rightfully so, that the NFA is unconstitutional.

And I think a lot of people are waiting for the day that they can legally purchase one from behind the counter.

And I think when that happens, there's going to be a tremendous spike, and people who may already own one will go and get a second or a third or whatever that number will be.

And I think that that's going to really bring some fresh excitement into the industry as a whole, because anytime there's so much pent up demand, because suppressors aren't legal in all 50 states.

And, you know, you have the wait time.

Whether it be one day or 16 months, it's still an unconstitutional wait time.

Once that gets, gets out of the NFA, it's going to be amazing to see the community for.

Why are you looking at me like, if there's.

If.

If there's no.

If there's no national Firearms act, the silencers would be totally.

Well, in some ways at least, they would be totally different.

So, you know, silencers, in some respect are kind of a wear item.

You know, they're like a barrel on a rifle.

Let's say it's not something that you're going to shoot a few, you know, a few hundred rounds and ruin.

Most people don't have the ammo budget to hurt a modern silencer, like for rifle silencer 22 before they passed.

But we build silencers in the industry to be super rugged because we know that most people don't want to buy pay that $200 tax over and over and over again.

If silencers are an over the counter item, you can make them out of plastic.

For 22 long rifle.

22 long rifle doesn't take very much.

They could be stamped sheet metal.

The durability, if you can just buy another one, you know, soundsters ideally would be disposable.

You know, there are some exceptions, like for precision shooters, you know, long range shooting, if you want the accuracy, silencers probably in that field are probably going to be about like they are now because the silencer can't be touching anything.

The bullet can't be touching anything in the silencer on the way out to maintain your accuracy.

So, you know, precision, like long range shooting, silencers are always going to be a high dollar, high precision item.

But like, for 22 long rifle, a plastic silencer would probably work, you know, and the reason we make them as nice as we do is because of the tax stamp.

Yeah, I mean, I know of countries that do not have any regulations on silencers at all.

And they are in the hardware store and they are cheap and they are plentiful.

And, you know, I would love to see them off the NFA.

I think we'd all love to see them off the NFA.

And I think the big thing, it's like you said, there's so many people who have bought him and we see an increase that at some point, you know, it's gotta be deemed as in common use.

Yeah.

So one of my big questions that I have to wrestle with every day about this new eforms wait time business is, is it temporary or is this the new norm?

So that's you know.

Cause, like, I gotta decide how many silencers to buy.

You know, if the.

If the wait time goes to.

If they just turn it off one day, I mean, they basically just turned it on.

The decision was made somewhere that they needed it on, that it was gonna run faster.

Now, if they turn it back off, then, you know, that that's gonna hurt the market probably, at least to some extent.

People will still want silencers, but maybe not in the demand they do now.

So, you know, for viewers watching this show, like, if you can put pressure on our politicians to make sure at the very least, in the meantime, until we get the NFA that, you know, these wait times stay the way they are.

Cause, like, my concern is we're talking about the Texas thing, the Texas attorney general lawsuit and stuff.

What if these are just being turned?

What if.

What if eforms are short right now to make a case for the judge that's deciding that case?

You know, it's not a big deal to buy silencer.

It only takes a week.

When that case.

What's to stop them from turning it back to a six month wait time again or a year?

Well, you're not wrong.

I mean, that's always a fear as a business is to over buy.

You know, and how many.

We always say that.

We've said in the past that the ATF has this attack at the dinner table.

And just think about how many suppressor shops or gun shops that also do suppressors if they're buying their supply or their demand for the shorter eforms.

And now you have suppressor companies who are also seeing the demand, and they need to up their labor force and up their production numbers, and then all of a sudden, it gets shut off again.

It could devastate that whole part of the industry.

Yeah.

I'm a retailer, so I have to buy.

We don't make our own silencers.

We sell pretty much every major silencer manufacturer in the country.

So we're buying for however long ahead of time, let's say.

But I would imagine a manufacturer's got it worse.

They've got to.

They've got, you know, to have materials on a schedule to make sure that they're not just sitting, not making anything.

That would be even scarier for those guys, probably, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is what she was taking.

Are we out of time?

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for.

For coming on.

I really have learned a lot of in this conversation because of, you know, there's a ton of people that maybe have seen suppressors on video games, or maybe they, have you seen them in the movies, but maybe they didn't realize the whole wet versus dry and aspects that are kind of involved.

I think that was the thing for me.

I don't own a suppressor currently, and so when I go to arrange day and someone hands me something to shoot, I'm like, this is awesome.

But it's not something that I personally own at this moment.

I'm actually, hopefully when I get back home, I'm going to start filling out my paperwork for my first one.

So we'll see.

So it's exciting.

And if anybody wants to try one, we have a.

We're.

We have an open range at the store.

We don't charge to let people try one.

It's an easy sell if you can get actually somebody to try one.

Once you try one, though, you're probably gonna want one.

So what we're saying is if you're in East Tennessee, go see Tennessee silencers.

So where can everyone find you?

Your website, social media all tennesseesilencer.com.

We have a Facebook and an Instagram and a YouTube channel.

And you can come by.

The store can call us and order over the phone.

That kind of thing.

Perfect.

Fantastic.

Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us today.

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