In October, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, reported that Americans owned 4.9 million silencers as of July 2024 according to data provided by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).1This total includes civilian silencers as well as those owned by state and local law enforcement. The National Firearm Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR) does not include those owned by the U.S. government: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/undefined/atf-national-firearms-act-handbook-chapter-3/download. Compared to previous reporting, this updated total reflects an alarming surge in silencer sales: In the first six months of 2024 alone, Americans purchased and registered a staggering 1.4 million silencers.
The data shows that between May 2021 and July 2024, a mere three-year span, Americans accumulated nearly as many silencers as were registered in the previous 87 years — since the National Firearms Act (NFA) first mandated their registration in 1934.
To read our most recent investigation into silencer sales and see a state-by-state breakdown of silencer ownership, click here.
Same-day approvals for silencer sales
Since 1934, the NFA has imposed strict registration requirements on silencers, or sound suppressors, because they muffle the sound of gunfire and make it difficult to determine where a shot originated. Civilians interested in purchasing or building a silencer must first submit an application to the ATF along with a copy of their fingerprints, a passport-style photo, and a $200 tax stamp before undergoing an enhanced background check.
As the ATF notes, the NFA application process was initially designed to “curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in NFA firearms,” and the $200 tax stamp, which has never been increased or adjusted for inflation, “was considered quite severe and adequate to carry out Congress’ purpose to discourage or eliminate transactions in these firearms” in 1934.
In the past, silencer customers waited several months to have their NFA applications processed. But in December 2021, the ATF rolled out a new online “eForms” system — after successful lobbying by the NSSF — that dramatically sped up approvals. Well-known silencer retailers like the Silencer Shop have boasted that they’ve seen same-day approvals for customers.
As discussed here, silencer retailers have also streamlined the silencer-buying process. In addition to offering financing options for silencers, companies will prepare NFA applications for customers, collect their fingerprints through mailed kits or kiosks set up at gun shops, and even ship silencers directly to customers’ doors.
THE NSSF’s EFFORTS TO INCREASE SILENCER SALES
This past April, the NSSF “praised new data” revealing that NFA processing wait times had “significantly dropped following direct NSSF advocacy efforts among lawmakers in Washington, D.C.” The NSSF also stated that it began pushing for the ATF to process NFA applications electronically as far back as 2013. In that April blog post, the NSSF’s senior vice president and general counsel, Larry Keane, said, “We’re pleased to see industry efforts to reduce these wait times have been successful for our association members and for lawful firearm owners.”
More recently, when the NSSF’s research director, Salom Fatohi, announced that Americans owned nearly 5 million silencers, he claimed that silencers are now “as normalized among the shooting and hunting community as TikTok is with Gen Z. What was a rarity as recently as a decade ago, it is now a normal occurrence to find a suppressor-equipped firearm at a local range or hunting camp.”
According to Fatohi, shooters and hunters who “previously dreaded [the] long wait time to purchase” a silencer are now being drawn to buying them. “As a result, silencer registration metrics are off the chart.”
Fatohi noted that the NSSF is continuing to push for bills like the Hearing Protection Act, which would remove silencers from the NFA and allow them to be sold like any other firearm, and the Tax Stamp Revenue Transfer for Wildlife and Recreation Act, which would “reallocate the funding generated from suppressor tax stamps” so that 15 percent of the revenue “would go to the ATF’s NFA division to fund and further improve the processing” of silencer applications.
THE DAMAGED CAUSED BY SILENCERS
Attempts at silencer deregulation are often pitched as helping protect the hearing of gun owners, but shooting a silencer-equipped firearm without hearing protection can still cause permanent hearing damage.
In an infographic, the NSSF claimed that silencers “make shooting and hunting safer and more enjoyable,” and that there were “only 15 federal cases involving the use of a suppressor in the commission of a crime from 1995 to 2005.” But the source the NSSF cited actually states that there were significantly more cases — 153 — during that decade in which “evidence suggests a silencer was used for a criminal purpose.”
Additionally, that small window of time does not include the use of silencers in recent mass shootings — like those that occurred in Virginia Beach in 2019 and Monterey Park in 2023 — or cases involving armed robbers, drug traffickers, terrorists, anti-government extremists, and people who have attacked police, as cataloged in this Violence Policy Center report. The ATF states that it recovered and traced nearly 300 silencers from crime scenes in 2022 alone.
Yet in a recent interview, Keane reiterated the NSSF’s support for the Hearing Protection Act and claimed that the current registration requirements for silencers serve “no public safety purpose.”2Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, “Firearms Industry Cheers Trump’s Victory,” November 6, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ouIms0vYA&ab_channel=BearingArms%27Cam%26Co, at 9:49.