Do I Need Special Sights and a Custom Holster to Add a Silencer to My Gun?

We’ve all seen plenty of silencers in movies and video games. The hero needs to be as quiet as possible, eliminating targets without being detected. He moves quickly and quietly, silently dispatching bad guy after bad guy. This kind of mission would be impossible without his trusty tool: a silencer. In this post, we’ll look at a few aspects of silencers, including what suppressor height sights are and whether you need a special holster to accommodate them.

Should I Add a Silencer to My Pistol?

Hollywood would have us believe that a silencer turns a single pistol into an assassination machine. Each pull of the trigger reduces the loud report of a handgun bullet to the near-whisper of a mouse fart. While that isn’t actually the case (with one notable exception that we’ll get to in a minute), a silencer can have a huge effect on the noise of your handgun.

When you really think about it, a silencer is more of a piece of safety equipment than anything else. Shooting an average 9mm pistol unsilenced (say, a SIG P365) can produce noise levels of 157 db or higher. That’s more than 140 db, which is generally considered the threshold for physical pain.

However, when you suppress that same handgun, you can tame its report to a much more manageable level. In fact, a silencer can reduce the noise from a SIG P365 to less than 126 db. That may seem pretty loud, but it’s actually 16 times quieter than the same gun fired without a silencer.

Silencers and 45 ACP

We’d be remiss if we didn’t cover how a silencer will affect the noise from a 45 ACP. While some may consider the 45 cartridge to be inferior to the 9mm ballistically, there’s one place it really excels.

Since 45 ACP is naturally a subsonic round, a silencer can further reduce the noise it makes. It’s really something you need to hear for yourself to understand. But using a silencer with your 45 will make it nearly impossible to hear, on par with the “whistling whisper” noise that Hollywood depicts.

What are Suppressor Height Sights?

If you want to run a silencer on one of your guns, you’re going to need suppressor height sights. Most silencers have a diameter of more than 1.25 inches. As a result, they’ll cover the sight picture of regular factory sights. That means you won’t be able to see what you’re shooting at with standard sights. That’s where suppressor height sights come in. You can replace your gun’s standard sights with suppressor height ones to create a sight picture above the radius of a silencer.