The 3rd annual silencer shoot was a great success. The day started out for me in the morning with the junior small bore shoot, then I finished setting up for the silencer shoot. We had a large 18” plate mounted at 150 yards, two falling plate racks set up at 110 and 200 yards which could be reset with long ropes as well as several smaller plates at 25 and 50 yards. The falling plate racks were really nice and we could hit them with anything 308 and below (lead core) without damaging them. The larger 18” plate mounted in the tractor tire was holed and dinged a bit by a subsonic 50 cal with steel core ammo and a 338 ultra mag. Sometime during the event someone struck one of the pieces of rebar holding it up, but otherwise it held up well.
Some people started showing up at 1200; it seems that the shoot had been advertised as being from 12-4pm instead of 2-6 pm. Since the range normally closes to the public at 4pm on weekends I choose 2-6 to minimize the impact on public and member shooting when restricting the rifle line to suppressed firearms only. The rifle line was packed from 1-5 pm with lots of gunfire, but not so noisy.
I brought over 3000 rounds of ammo to the shoot for the public to use, but it seems that hardly anyone showed up empty handed. Plenty of 223/308/22lr ammo belonging to the attendees made it through my firearms so I still had lots left to bring home.
Wynakos Machine showed up with several suppressed firearms and ammo. They are a machine shop in Monroe that started making firearms two years ago. They were generous with their ammo and answered questions associated with silencer ownership and showed off some interesting designs. The presence of licensed manufacturers adds a bit of class to the activities. Thank you guys very much.
Several interesting guns were present. A 44 mag Silent Destroyer was there with 240 cast at 1075fps and with a noise level lower than my 300 whisper. I still have some learning to do before I make something as nice as that. I also saw a Windrunner in 308 shooting subsonic ammo; very nice. One gentleman brought his pre-94 register SBR suppressed Uzi. The massive can really knocked down the noise. Wynakos Machine had a couple of semi-auto rifles with integral cans that consisted of a monocore welded to the barrel with a sleeve over it. Simple and elegant in my opinion.
Since this year’s event was such a success probably due in part to better publicity, we may have two silencer shoots a year from now on. I also want to come up with a few contests to spice things up. Perhaps a shoot off to determine which 22lr, 223 and 308 firearms are the least noisy. The competitors could all use standard ammo and have some blind judging as proper noise meters are so expensive. Another suggestion was giving a competitor one minute to see how many plates they can knock down; the 3-plates racks would be reset as they were knocked down, miss once and you are done. If anyone has other ideas, please let me know.
Perhaps we can raffle off a silencer at next year’s event.
I had a really great time, thanks to everyone who showed up to shoot. It meant a lot to me.
Randy Bragge
