There’s a tendency among shooters to want the best gear, and there’s nothing wrong with that. One doesn’t walk into a car dealership and demand to see their shittiest compact, after all, and shooters are no different. For the most part, people want to outfit themselves with quality equipment, and for better or worse, the barometer of quality gear is the military. This is a fallacy for a number of reasons.

1. Military equipment is geared toward a specific purpose that 99% of people will never see.
2. The military has passed on acquiring great pieces of kit due to price or politics.
3. The military makes stupid decisions.

Number 3 is kind of subjective, but if you need evidence just look at the latest fiasco wherein the military spent $5 Billion dollars on camouflage that makes Soldiers easier to see.

The end result of this thinking is that people go out and buy stuff for their weapons because it’s “milspec” even though “mispec” will do absolutely nothing for them. A person who does this obsessively is commonly referred to as a “mall ninja.”  This is the guy who puts a long-range scope on his 16-inch AR and only shoots it at a 100-yard range.  The guy who buys a plate carrier and no plate.

And believe me, it’s hard to keep yourself from buying the latest gadgets for your rifle. They make so many scopes now!  With so many dots! Some are green and some are red! And it has RAILS! You can put a scope on top of another scope!  HOW CAN YOU MISS WITH TWO SCOPES?! YOU CAN’T! IT’S A MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITY!!!

Then you look at the price tag attached to your new super scope, and you realize you’ve made a horrible mistake. “Two scopes?! What the &*%$ was I thinking? You can’t hit anything with two scopes! It’s a mathematical impossibility!”

“But, TJ, you condescending %&*$#, who gives a crap what we put on our rifles?” you ask. And the answer is “no one but you.” If you’re military or LEO and you live in that tactical world, this isn’t for you. If you want something because it looks cool, then nothing I say will change your mind. This new series of articles is for the people who are just getting into firearms and their exposure to what good gear is comes from movies, video games or the internet. Because you shouldn’t feel like you have to spend a lot of money for something you’re not going to use or use to its potential.  So we’re going to kick this off with what I feel is the most egregious example of mall ninjitsu, the fake suppressor.

Now, look, there is a lot, and I mean A LOT of “tacticool” gear out there, but the saving grace of 99% of them is that they at least serve some actual purpose.  I may not need a quad-rail handguard on my AR, but at least it performs a role holding stuff. A fake suppressor, on the other hand, is like motorcycle helmet made of paper mache. It LOOKS like a helmet, but when the time comes to protect my bean from the ravages of the open road it doesn’t even do a proper job of holding the pieces of my skull together for the paramedics who must now deal with the added inconvenience of finding them all.

Now, a real suppressor is a good piece of kit to have. It’s better on the ears, and in the states where you can hunt with them, you can take an animal without scaring off every other piece of game for three miles. The problem is they’re expensive and you have to have ATF’s permission to have one in the form of a tax stamp, and that can take ages. So, instead, people put a fake suppressor on their rifles, usually AR15s. It doesn’t make the retort any less loud. It doesn’t hide muzzle flash. The best you can say is that the weight of this metal cylinder on the end of your rifle helps with muzzle rise. It’s like instead of having a spoiler put on your car, you have a vanity plate that says “SPOILER.”  I’ve heard of some people having fake suppressors permanently fixed to their short-barreled rifles in order to get around those pesky laws mandating that rifles be of a certain barrel length, but sweet monkey Jesus!

Let me get this straight. You wanted a short-barreled rifle, but since for whatever legal reason you can’t have a short-barreled rifle you extended the length of your barrel by welding a fake suppressor onto the end of your gun. The end result is a rifle with a longer barrel that behaves like a short barrel (as the fake suppressor isn’t rifled).

Now call me stupid, but I think I just would have bought a longer rifle to begin with.

I’ve seen these things being sold online for as much as $125. That’s $125 for a block of metal that makes your barrel longer with no net benefit.

But if you HAVE to get one…get the best one out there.  This one is from Spike’s and costs about $40.

What to get instead

Okay, you want your AR to look cool. I get that. But you also want it to be useful. And if you’re not going to shell out the cash and time to get a real suppressor, you should probably just get a new flash suppressor/compensator. Within the same price range as a fake suppressor you can get something that screws onto the end of your AR with an actual function. And with the wide breadth of designs out there, you can get something that also makes your rifle look nice. A compensator diverts gasses from the muzzle to help “push” the barrel down as you fire, cutting down on recoil and muzzle rise. A flash suppressor hides the muzzle flash from your rifle, meaning that if you’re shooting at that damn raccoon who keeps coming up on your porch in the dead of night, you’re not blinding yourself with a big flash of light on the first shot. You can buy them separately, or for a little extra you can get something that does both, and they’re only about an inch long.

There’s tactical and then there’s tacticool. The difference between them is practicality. For the no-kidding operators out there who really do jump out of planes and conduct special operations, tactical is practical. For those of us who don’t, it’s not. It’s tacticool. It’s mostly harmless, but it can be expensive. Julius Caesar was said to have a servant stand next to him during speeches to whisper the words, “You are not a god,” into his ear as the crowd cheered him to keep his feet on the ground. I sometimes think it would be nice while I’m browsing at the gun store if my wife would whisper, “You are not an operator,” into mine.

Keep shooting.

TJ

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