You can probably imagine — or maybe you can’t — the turmoil that’s gone on in the suppressor business over the last decade. From the Hearing Protection Act having a real chance at passage — and then being yanked — to the incredible shrinking eForm 4 wait times, to zapping the $200 NFA penalty transfer tax and now, most recently, the Jensen v. ATF ruling in a Texas Federal District Court…if you think it’s been hard to keep track of the current states of play, put yourself in the place of someone whose business is making suppressors and other NFA items.
For someone in the can business, navigating those shifting realities must have felt something like that cheese rolling thing our mildly impaired cousins back in the old country still do for some reason.
In additions to the names you know, what seems like dozens of new entrants have decided that the shifting ground and increased demand present a good opportunity and have jumped into the business over the last 12 to 18 months. That includes companies you never expected to see making silencers and others that make you think adding them to their lineup probably makes sense. Maybe.
But when you’re the industry leader, you have all of the challenges that come with the changeable business and regulatory environment along with the advantages of size, name recognition, and well-established brand equity to help you maneuver…all while doing everything you can think of to stay on top.
SilencerCo has been around for 18 years now. They started out like most new can makers, turning out a rimfire suppressor called the Sparrow. Since that time, the Salt Lake City (well, West Valley City, to be precise) company has grown exponentially to become the 800-pound gorilla in the suppressor biz.
I toured SilencerCo back in 2019 and I was there again a week ago. The business may be in the same location, but seven years later, it’s hard to recognize it as the same operation. That’s how much it’s grown in the intervening time. The company has since added a couple of satellite facilities in the Salt Lake area as well.
The suppressor business as a whole has changed more than a little bit since SilencerCo turned out their first Sparrow back in 2008. Back then, there were about 11,000 Form 4s processed a year. For the whole country.
In 2026, ATF has churned through over a million (mostly eForm 4s) just in the first half of the year.
So the market has not only grown and evolved in terms of what kinds of products are selling (pretty much everything), but also who’s now willing to consider buying a can at all. With the expansion of the market, the company’s product line has grown to match the demand, broadening from mostly a few, purpose-built designs to what’s now a wide array of models and designs meant to tickle the fancy of virtually anyone with a threaded barrel.
That means a huge range of calibers, weights, materials, durability, gas management and performance for everyone from the weekend plinker to elk hunters, PRS shooters, law enforcement and tactical operators who operate tactically.
Yeah, that’s a lot. And it means a company like SilencerCo that prefers to be as vertically integrated as possible — retaining control of as much of the the manufacturing process as they can — needs to do many things and do them all well.
I wasn’t the only one to tour SilencerCo’s production facility. The company invited a group of mouth-breathing gunwriters to Utah (and then bussed us up to Idaho) last week to let us poke around, give us some trigger time with their cans and answer a lot — and I mean a lot — of questions about the business.
Tours are always cool, but I’ve seen a lot of CNC machines and Cerakoting booths in my time. Here are some Hybrid 46M suppressors being laser-welded . . .
And their well-stocked shooting range is a blast (sorry).
Kinda puts the NRA’s Wall o’ Guns to shame, no? SilencerCo has to make sure their cans work on virtually every type of firearm out there, hence the impressive inventory of weaponry.
More important than the tour, though, was the time we got with the company’s top brass including president Scott Clinger, general counsel David Kellis and chief marketing officer Mike Aland.
All of the keyboard pounders who were there had questions about the Texas case and how the company — SilencerCo is one of the named plaintiffs — would be operating in the new environment. But given that so much is still in flux, they understandably didn’t want to 1) speculate on what might happen or 2) say anything that might be, er, counterproductive. Just because the DOJ didn’t ask for an extension of the judge’s stay of his injunction doesn’t mean they still can’t. And Justice’s finest still have until October 5 to file an appeal…if they choose to.
Suppressor sales are so high these days because the barriers to ownership are now so low. While a rising tide lifts all boats, when you’re the biggest suppressor maker with so many cans to choose from, growth of the overall market benefits you more than anyone else. Clinger told us that about 20% of all cans sold have been SilencerCo cans.
Demand first kicked into overdrive back in 2024 when ATF finally got its regulatory act together (with a lot of prodding from the industry and the American Suppressor Association) and wait times for eForm 4 approvals plunged from months — sometimes close to a year — to days. As in single digits. Zeroing out the tax stamp as of January 1 kicked sales up to a level approaching ludicrous speed.
And now there’s the Jensen decision with the possibility of still more good things on the way.
Suppressor ownership hasn’t been this easy since 1934. Mike Aland told me about a friend of his, a Sheriff, who always whined that he didn’t want to buy a can because he didn’t want to wait nine months for permission. Then he told him he didn’t want to pay the .gov $200 on top of the cost of the suppressor. Then he said he didn’t want to fill out all that paperwork and register whatever can be bought.
Welp. All of those barriers are now gone.
But as much as suppressor sales have increased over the last couple of years, there’s still a huge amount of room to grow. There are about 100 million gun owners in America and c0ming up on seven million suppressors in the wild. Lots of those owners have more than one can, so let’s generously assume that there are five million suppressor owners in the US of A. That still leaves a lot of people making a lot more noise than is necessary.
I asked Aland what keeps a lot of gun owners from taking the silencer plunge. It turns out misinformation has been a factor. He told me about working an NRA show a few years ago and having people ask why SilencerCo was exhibiting since it was illegal for civilians to ow suppressors.
So yeah, there was a lot of FUD out there about suppressors amongst the Fudd population. Aland said, however, that even among the crowds that waddle through the NRA convention aisles, he’s heard less and less of that kind of thing in recent years, so that’s progress.
He also told me that on the regulatory front, SilencerCo will be directing more of their efforts and dollars toward the states going forward. That includes a couple that currently outlaw cans that he thinks can be persuaded to change their laws, as well as convincing a number of other states that currently require NFA registration to eliminate that mandate.
Meanwhile, as demand spiked, SilencerCo made a significant decision last year. While the market was being flooded with models from new (and existing) makers, they decided not to introduce any new designs (aside from the elusive S98).
SilencerCo made the strategic decision to concentrate on continuing to produce everything in their current product lineup, keeping them flowing to their distributors and getting them into gun owners’ hands. Better to keep their popular products available and customers happy during the boom, they figured, than spreading production capacity out among more, newer models and losing business as a result of stock-outs.
That seems about to change in 2027, though. While the company brass was studiously tight-lipped about specifics, they hinted at new models we’re probably going to be seeing in the first half of next year starting with the SHOT Show.
Aland told me the strategy is to scale up (even more) in a controlled way that lets them meet demand while maintaining quality. That quality level minimizes warranty service requests and lets them keep their warranty turnaround times to about 20 hours. That’s right, Aland says that FedEx usually has possession of cans sent in for warranty service longer than SilencerCo does. That kind of customer service makes customers happy and sells more suppressors.
I mentioned earlier that we’d gotten trigger time with a number of SilencerCo’s cans. That was an understatement. After the tour we travelled north to the (truly) magnificent Day Mountain Ranch Resort outside of Preston, Idaho in the southeast corner of the state. The accommodations and shooting facilities there are first rate. If you get the chance, I highly recommend the trip.
We put the cans — and guns and glass — through their paces running a 13-stage Ultimate Hunting Experience course (with steel targets ranging from about 135 to over 1000 yards) and taking advantage of Day Mountain’s 2300 acres that allow for shooting out as far as two miles.
So what’s next for the suppressor business? That’s a good question. While clarity is in short supply these days, we just got the news that ATF is now promising to provide guidance which, depending on what they finally say, will likely convince more of the understandably reluctant FFLs out there that it’s safe to start selling cans (ideally made by the named plaintiffs) to members of GOA, FPC, TSRA, CCRKBA, etc. That would mean still more sales and, if history holds true, about a fifth of those will have SilencerCo’s name on them.
So if you’re in the can business, and especially if you’re the industry leader, all indicators point to continued growth with the biggest limiting factors being consumer acceptance, disposable income and the availability of threaded barrels. The sun is shining brightly on the business and now is the time to make a lot of hay.