Silencers for home defense?
At The Truth About Guns, blogger Nick Leghorn takes a crack at convincing readers that silencers are a good idea for home defense. He points out that discharging a firearm indoors can be disorienting due to the loud muzzle blast. He suggests mitigating this with a silencer. He points out that when you are facing an aggressor in low-light conditions, you can’t afford to lose your hearing.
What Nick does not mention is that loud noises aren’t the only thing that can be disorienting when shooting indoors. The muzzle flash from a firearm is detrimental to your ability to see in near dark, causing your pupils to contract and depleting your retina’s rod cells of the rhodopsin that allows the human eye to see in low light. Silencers not only diminish the intensity of the sound generated by a muzzle blast, they also significantly reduce the visible muzzle flash. Rather than being in a visual time-out for half an hour while your eyes recover, use of a silencer allows a defender to maintain greater situational awareness after shooting to protect himself and his family members.