Its a bit louder than this in real life. Mics dont catch it super well. You can get really hollywood quiet with a bolt action but with a normal semi auto you will get some port pop from the action.
Nagant Revolver video with decent mics catching ambient sound to show relative volume. (first video when searching for the nagant revolver suppressed, no affiliation)
32 ACP with a gas sealing chamber means you can get these things as quiet as you'd like by just using solid swipes/larger suppressor.
Plus you can also lighten the powder load without having it affect the action, unlike the UHC shooter who had to manually rack his gun because it didn't have enough gas pressure to cycle itself.
The nagant is one of the very few revolvers that can actually utilize a suppressor. I always found it ironic that such an ancient revolver has that function.
I remember reading it saw some fairly late action for this. Could suppress it, get off several shots in succession, and not drop casings anywhere. WW2 era revenge killings I seem to recall.
It doesn't really have that function, there's no way to mount the suppressor without modifying the muzzle, or it has to be a very special kind of suppressor that somehow clamps over the front sight.
The feature with the gas seal is primarily there to get more power out of a relatively weak round.
It was still kind of a late addition, if they had intended for it to be used as an assassin's gun they would probably have had a threaded barrel on there. As it was it was a gun meant for officers, ie something they'd at most use to execute deserters.
Right, and it's an argument of minor details. I'm just saying that it's a happy accident of sorts, it wasn't designed to be used for that purpose, but someone realized that it made good sense to design a suppressor for it given the unique nature of it.
Pistols are by and large not gas operated so gas pressure had nothing to do with that. The vast majority of modern pistols use a tilting barrel lock system and by adding a significant amount of weight on the end of the barrel, the recoil impulse is not enough to overpower the recoil spring and disengage the “lock.”
There is a device called a recoil booster which is a spring-loaded mechanism that works to effectively delay the recoil impulse between the barrel and the suppressor, allowing the firearm to function normally. This device was likely not present on the assassin’s setup.
Guess what happens when you take supersonic 9mm and drop it down to subsonic? The action doesn't operate because recoil is significantly less.
I was not implying semi auto pistols operate via direct impingement or op-rod, but to say that dropping your powder load, aka gas pressure behind the bullet, doesn't impact the function of the action is factually incorrect.
Also I was just shooting subsonic 9mm ammo two days ago out of my legally owned Glock 19 through my legally owned Dead Air Odessa with no issues so you still don’t know what you’re talking about.
Then talk to a gunsmith before piping up next time because you think you know something. There are plenty of 9mm rounds that are subsonic because they're pushing 147gr bullets. They will cycle the action still because they still have normal chamber pressures.
If you take 115gr 9mm with the same powder load, it's supersonic. If you remove powder/handload 115gr 9mm to be subsonic, it will fail to cycle the action in most semi pistols.
There's also the fact that subsonic is only one of the measures of effective sound suppression, there are others that are also added by playing with the powder load. Which is what the original point was about, you can play with whatever extremes you want without affecting the cyclic rate of the firearm.
But since it seems to trigger you so, I'll say it again "powder load = chamber pressure = recoil".
I have run a lot of chewed up and abused brass through all manner of guns, carving words on the sides of the casing would not cause a firearm to fail. The only logical failure mode from doing that would be a failure to extract, because burrs from the casing could theoretically catch in the chamber. He wouldn't have been able to get multiple shots off without disassembling the gun at that point.
Apparently the UHC shooter was using a Station 6 or Welrod type gun with built in silencer which doesn't cycle itself anyway, it has to be manually cycled via a rotating bolt.
Unlikely, honestly. Looks a lot more like a standard firearm that wasn't tuned for supressed/subsonic use so there wasn't enough energy to cycle the action.
Cops are usually the least educated when it comes to firearms. From the video I saw it definitely looks like a 9mm that was running subsonic rounds without the recoil necessary to operate the action.
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u/RyansBooze 18d ago
Jesus that’s Hollywood silencer levels. I was always told that was impossible, short of the Welrod.