States Move to Protect Suppressor Owners as NFA Tax Falls to $0

In 1934, the National Firearms Act (NFA) was passed by Congress. The bill, which became law, was a consolation prize for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) administration. The primary purpose of licensing and registration of all handguns had been stripped from the bill because of lobbying by the NRA and Second Amendment supporters. One item left on the bill was an absurdly high tax on silencers/suppressors.

Silencers had never been involved much in crime. No serious reason is included in legislative history for the inclusion of silencers in the NFA. Their ban was part of the hysteria of the time. The new Attorney General, Homer Cummings, conflated guns and crime. The NFA was his grab for power within the FDR administration.

In 1934, when what was left of the National Firearms Act made silencers unaffordable except for the very rich, the law was relatively limited. It only applied to silencers that had crossed state lines. If you made your own silencer, it was not involved in interstate commerce, so the federal law did not apply. It was the middle of the depression, and people were too concerned with having enough to eat and a roof over their heads to be worried about a silly new federal law.

All of that changed over the next 50 years. The Interstate Commerce clause and the National Firearms Act of 1934 were expanded far beyond their original boundaries. Short-barreled rifles came to include pistols with shoulder stocks. Short-barreled shotguns came to include revolvers with shot cartridges and smoothbores. The Interstate Commerce Clause came to include almost everything. Bureaucracies became the dominant force in most people’s lives.

I think the suppressor in the photo (in the OP's linked article) is a SiencerCo, possibly a Spectre 9 with SilencerCo's "muzzle booster."

Putting a suppressor on a firearm with a barrel that moves under recoil when fired (such as JMB's tried-and-true "tilting-barrel" design) ordinarily would effecively add considerable weight to the barrel, which would tend to interfere with the action's freedom of movement under recoil.

Before the invention of the "booster," cartridges (and loads) had to be experimented with to try to find one that would still cycle reliably on that particular pistol once the suppressor was added. But functionality was still "iffy," which is why people who carried suppressed handguns with bad intentions generally did so with fixed-barrel guns, like Walther PPs (or PPK or PPKS) or High Standards.

That changed around 1982 when Doug Olsen, who was working for Knight's Armamant Corp, invented the "muzzle booster." Apart from the obvious Nordic connection, nobody (who's talking) has a clue why but it was patented as a "Nielsen device."

It's also called a "Linear Inertial Decoupler" (or "LID"), which is a mouthful but it perfectly describes how it works. It briefly "de-couples" the mass of the barrel from the mass of the suppressor, allowing the barrel to begin recoiling with reduced interference from the weight of the can.

Shown from the suppressor's point of view:

A booster lets the gun run suppressed as reliably as un. When you see some guy in a movie screwing a suppressor on the barrel of a 1911 without a booster, if he's not planning on cycling the slide manually and shooting it as a single-shot, that's pure Hollywood BS.

The booster is NOT an NFA device and you can buy them for $100 and up with no paperwork.

For a more complete description of the operation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2az3p0jONb4

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