LIBERTY HILL, TEXAS—Last Friday, Ars took a road trip deep into the heart of Texas to meet up with SilencerCo’s chief revenue officer Jason Schauble and get a private demo of the company’s new Maxim 9 pistol. Unlike SilencerCo’s other products—which we tested about a year ago—the Maxim 9 isn’t just a suppressor that you attach onto the barrel of a firearm. The Maxim is SilencerCo’s first integrally suppressed pistol: in other words, it’s a weapon and a silencer, all in one single unit.

The Maxim 9 as it’s currently being demoed is actually a preproduction design, marrying the back half of a 9mm Smith & Wesson M&P to a custom-designed eccentric suppressor/receiver/barrel front assembly. The most visually distinctive part of the weapon is that eccentric suppressor—so called because it’s not a cylindrical design but rather hangs down from the front of the barrel like some kind of weird science-fiction pistol.

SilencerCo is the largest domestic producer of suppressors, selling about 40 percent of the "cans" to both private and government buyers in the United States. The idea behind the Maxim 9 was to take the company’s existing technology portfolio and apply it to creating an all-in-one solution: a silenced weapon that fires off-the-shelf ammunition and can also be easily handled and holstered without using specialized gear.

The prototype weapons we got to put our hands on and fire accomplishes most of those goals. The Maxim 9 won’t fit in an off-the-shelf holster and one of the two prototypes Schauble brought had some issues with reliably cycling rounds into the chamber, but on the whole the concept worked.

Quick refresher: The skinny on suppressors

In a modern firearm, a bullet is expelled from the barrel by the build-up of gasses generated by the detonation (actually deflagration) of the powder in the bullet’s cartridge. The main source of the crack you hear when a weapon fires is the sound pressure generated by the expulsion of those hot gasses (there’s more to it than that, too, since the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier also contributes to the noise). Suppressors damp down the sound of a weapon by trapping the hot exhaust gasses expelled when a weapon fires.

If you disassemble a suppressor, you’ll see that inside they contain a concentric series of baffles designed to catch and deflect the gas away from the barrel’s exit. The baffles, coupled with the insulative properties of the suppressor’s shell, are the things that do the actual suppressing. But effectively suppressing a modern semiautomatic or automatic firearm can be a tricky job, since it’s not just a matter of trapping gasses—most firearms rely on the kinetic energy from the round or the gas generated by its firing to cycle their actions and load the next round into the chamber, and suppressors have to be designed to not interfere with the weapon’s own cycling mechanism. This can be a difficult thing to get right.

Furthermore, as we learned in our previous dive into the technology, silencers don’t "silence" anything—for the most part, screwing a silencer onto the end of a pistol or rifle or shotgun will reduce the sound of the weapon’s report to a hearing-safe level (ideally, less than 130 decibels). The Hollywood image of a hero firing a suppressed pistol at one end of a hallway and not alerting the guards at the other end is exactly that: a Hollywood image.

There are suppressor/weapon/ammunition combinations that can yield extremely low sound pressure levels, but those typically involve customized weapons firing small or low-velocity rounds. In the real world, with an off-the-shelf weapon and standard store-bought ammunition, the quietest you’re going to get is about the level of a car door slamming (this is possible with something like the Walther PPK/S chambered in .22LR and a SilencerCo Sparrow suppressor).

A suppressor on the end of a larger handgun—one chambered in 9x19mm or .45ACP—is still subjectively pretty noisy. Even when firing outdoors, without an indoor range bay to echo the sound, putting a full magazine of ammunition through a suppressed pistol is likely to leave you with a ringing in your ears. Firing a suppressed rifle (like the 5.56mm HK G36 Schauble brought along this time for comparison with the Maxim) is frankly loud as hell and will get your ears ringing after only a few shots. However, there’s still a substantial reduction in sound from firing the weapon unsuppressed, which will leave you essentially deafened after a shot or two.

Look, feel, sound, and acquisition

Keeping in mind that the two Maxim 9s we fired were preproduction prototypes, the build quality was impressive and the pistols functioned as advertised. We put maybe a hundred rounds through the two Maxims, and we also had a number of other suppressed weapons available for comparison, ranging from small .22LR pistols all the way up to a ludicrous lever-action Marlin .45-70. Compared to several other suppressed 9x19mm pistols (including a Glock 26 and a Beretta 92FS), the Maxim 9 felt quieter. The large eccentric suppressor bolted to the front of the pistol didn’t screw with the balance, either—even without a magazine in place, the weapon didn’t feel front-heavy.

Recoil was considerably less than any other 9x19mm pistol I’d fired. This was partially because the integrated suppressor helps damp recoil by trapping the exhaust gasses, and it actually made the Maxim 9 relatively pleasant to shoot. I’d estimate from my short exposure to the weapon that the recoil was noticeably less than the Beretta 92FS/Osprey suppressor combo I own. Although we had a number of failures where one of the Maxim 9s wouldn’t cycle back into battery and had to be cleared by racking the slide, it’s hard to ding a prototype pistol for that—especially one as complicated as the Maxim 9 (plus, the other Maxim 9 didn’t appear to have any problems cycling).

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

The two prototypes didn’t look like prototypes—they had the fit and finish of production-quality firearms. The machine work was well done, and although they’re shaped too awkwardly for conventional carry, they were perfectly functional. Schauble explained that one of the challenges in building the pistols was confining all of the firearm’s function to the back half of the weapons. This meant a drastic shortening of the slide and the addition of upper rails for it to travel along. They also had to construct a new integrated barrel and feed ramp for the pistol, then use some of the suppressor’s length for the barrel so that the weapon would fire properly and accurately.

As it exists today, the Maxim 9 prototype is what Schauble describes as a "two serial" weapon. The pistol component, which as explained above is an extensively modified Smith & Wesson M&P—has its own factory serial number and is legally considered a firearm on its own. Then, the SilencerCo-manufactured suppressor has a second serial number. Technically the suppressor is the federally regulated component under the National Firearms Act, but effectively the entire weapon is an NFA-regulated device.

This means that once SilencerCo begins selling the pistols in whatever final form factor they end up taking, the process to purchase one will be identical to the process of buying a plain-jane suppressor today. Prospective customers will have to pay $200 to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for an appropriate tax stamp, and will have to buy the suppressor from a Federal Firearms License-holding dealer that’s authorized to deal in Title II NFA-restricted items. The suppressor is tracked from manufacture to sale by the BATF and registered to the owner (or to a legal entity like a trust or corporation that’s authorized to own the suppressor).

All told, while purchasing a pistol is a relatively quick process in most states, purchasing a suppressor—and therefore purchasing an integrally suppressed pistol—usually takes somewhere between three and nine months due to the paperwork required. And only 40 states allow suppressor ownership in the first place—residents of California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont cannot buy them).

Elephants in the room

It’s impossible to write a review of a firearm or firearm technology without addressing the obvious implications—especially when public shootings pop up with distressing regularity. Although silencers clearly don’t work like they do in movies, enabling stealth ninja assassins to pick off people at close range without being heard—they do quiet a weapon’s report to such an extent that it might make it difficult for someone to hear shots elsewhere in a building, for example. What role do suppressors play in the larger picture of gun violence?

Schauble’s answer to that question is that even though there are close to a 800,000 suppressors in private hands in the United States, SilencerCo is unaware of any of them ever being used in the commission of a crime. The complex process of buying and acquiring the suppressors, including the BATF paperwork and $200 tax stamp fee, have so far been a pretty good deterrent. Additionally, there is no direct sale loophole for suppressors: they cannot be sold by individuals, unless those individuals hold Federal Firearms Licenses and can sell Title II NFA items.

There are plenty of reasons why normal folks might want to buy suppressors. Schauble goes into them like a well-rehearsed list when we ask: for hunters who don’t want to have to constantly wear hearing protection, or to be able to teach kids to shoot when they might not want to have hearing protection on for the entire time, or even to save the ears of a hunting dog. Ultimately, like gun ownership itself, suppressor ownership is an individual decision and there’s a wild spectrum of feeling about it.

Availability and price

Though you can’t buy a Maxim 9 today, Schauble says SilencerCo plans to go to market by the end of the year with a production version of the pistol. The company is still playing with the final external form factor, with the goal of having it work with normal holsters and without any of the failure-to-feed issues we ran into.

Pricing also has yet to be determined. SilencerCo wants the final product to be available for less than the cost of a typical pistol plus silencer combo, but that’s a rather nebulous target; a 9x19mm handgun can range in price from maybe $250 on the low end for something from Century or Kel-Tec all the way up to over $1,000 for something like an HK USP or a Sig Sauer P226. Suppressors compatible with 9x19mm pistols range from $500 up to $1,000 depending on manufacturer and the amount of sound suppression. Buying a 9x19mm pistol and a suppressor can cost up to maybe $2,000 at the high end, and so that’s the price point SilencerCo is attempting to beat. When it's released, the purchase process will be exactly the same as with a suppressor: buyers will have to fill out BATF paperwork, apply for a tax stamp, and wait many months before the weapon actually arrives in their hands.

If there’s continued interest in the Ars readership, we’ll continue following the Maxim 9 toward release and will arrange another shooting trip when the final version is available.

Listing image by Lee Hutchinson