Dimensions of Stealth: Silent Shooting
by JOracle on Nov 19, 2008
The Mythical Paintball Silencer
Not long after the invention of the direct-feed paintball gun, players began to tinker with the idea of making their paintguns quieter. Paintball silencers have been around almost as long as hoppers.
In this four-part series on Dimensions of Stealth, we’ve discussed camouflaging yourself and your gear, moving silently, and identifying your target without being identified yourself.
Inevitably, however, even the stealthiest player is going to reveal himself the moment he fires a shot. Today’s paintball guns, relatively speaking, are loud. Unfortunately, there’s just no real effective (and legal) way to silence your paintgun today.
In the mid-1980s, Sheridan released a paintball long gun that just begged to be turned into a “sniper” rifle. Almost every Sheridan rifle you saw carried a homemade silencer on the end of its barrel. All paintguns, in those days, were pumps. Pumps, unlike semi-auto paintball guns, don’t have as much machine noise with each shot and this makes a silenced paintball gun especially quiet. As we were fond of saying in those days, paintball silencers sounded “like a gopher farting.”
Commercial paintball silencers flooded the market, though they weren’t a whole lot better than the homemade ones. They began appearing in magazine photos and on store shelves. Basically, a paintball silencer was a large tubular chamber that slid over the end of the paintball gun’s barrel. The inside of the chamber was usually a porous material that allowed the paintball gun’s gas to dissipate into the chamber before “popping” into the environment. Inside the silencer’s chamber, manufacturers usually packed loose material such as insulation or Brillo pads to further help deaden the sound.
Most of the “pop” that a paintball gun makes is the result of the paintball leaving the barrel with a burst of gas behind it. The sudden change in pressure from the gas in the barrel to the outside world creates the sound. The paintball silencer creates an intermediate airspace that traps much of the gas and sound while leaving the paintball to exit the barrel untouched.
Silencers, the Law, and You
But the glory days of paintball silencers were numbered. Firearm silencers are a controlled device under federal law. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) regulates the ownership and manufacture of a number of firearm devices, including machine guns and sound suppressors (otherwise known as “silencers.") In the early 1990s, the ATF ran tests and decided that paintball silencers could be used to quiet a true firearm and they notified all manufacturers of paintball silencers that they were in violation of federal law. The reach of big brother was fast and final. All paintball silencers disappeared from the market. Unless you’re a Class II firearm manufacturer (as Special Ops happens to be) you cannot technically own or manufacture a paintball silencer. However, I’ve never heard of the ATF breaking down the door of a paintballer because he made his own silencer for his paintball gun.
The vast majority of paintball “silencers” on the market today are “mock suppressors.” In other words, they look like silencers but they don’t do anything to quiet the marker. One noteworthy exception is the Smart Parts SP-8 which utilizes the plastic shroud around the already-ported barrel to create a sound-suppression effect. This works marginally well.
Currently, the best and most legal option for a paintball sniper who shoots anything but an SP-8 is to buy the quietest barrel possible and marry it to the quietest paintgun possible. The carbon-fiber barrels manufactured by Stiffi are just about the quietest thing out there. The C-Series barrel from Special Ops and Stiffi are excellent choices to quiet your market. Attached to a DM4, they make a combo that’s no louder than the silenced pumps of the old days, before the ATF came a-knocking.
To own a paintball gun silencer legally, you must live in one of the states that allow private ownership of sound suppressors. If so, you can purchase a silencer (paintball or firearm,) from a licensed firearms dealer (if such a thing were actually manufactured.) Then, you would have to get the signature of your local law enforcement officer on a form that requires a two-hundred dollar tax stamp. After waiting between two and six months, if you’re not a felon, the transfer of your paintball silencer would come through and you could go back to your dealer and pick it up.
Since the whole system is really hard, really expensive and takes a really long time, legal paintball silencers are almost never seen.
Otherwise, you’re left using one of the many “fake” paintball silencers (which don’t work to deaden sound,) or you can make your own and be illegal. If you buy a “fake” paintball silencer and it DOES actually dampen the sound of your paintball gun, it’s probably illegal, both for the manufacturer and for you. Every year, a few paintball tinkerers come out with illegal paintball silencers and the ATF sends them a nasty letter. Even if the manufacturer claims their paintball silencer is “legal” that doesn’t mean it’s true. Ask to see their letter from the ATF approving their design. Often, they’ll just blow the question off. To our knowledge, the ATF hasn’t approved of any paintball silencer designs as of this writing.
Striving for Silent Shooting
The bummer is that paintball silencers work great and they make the game much more fun. With a good paintball silencer, a sniper can take close shots and still not give away his position. Silencers are long and a little awkward, but they give great advantage to that long-ball, one-shot sniper. Basically, the quieter your gun is, the longer it’ll take the opponent to figure out where you are and engage you. A quiet gun or a silencer can extend the amount of time you have to whack an opponent before he starts shooting back at you. This is especially true of shots over twenty yards. In short, silent shooting makes a big enough difference that any self-respecting paintball sniper should work toward quieting his marker.
Hopefully, someday soon, someone will figure it out with the ATF so that paintball fields will once again resonate with the sound of gophers farting.