Hasta La Ideas

I’ve got a friend from Alabama who told me that growing up, most families she knew kept shotguns in the house. When you heard a noise in the middle of the night, the shotgun was the go-to item, and she explained that the CHIK-CHIK sound of “racking” it carried across the porch and was enough to discourage the casual burglar.

Another sound shotguns make is the actual blast, and I’m told it’s deafening. Twelve-gauges reportedly top out around 150 to 165 decibels, and inside a house, where there are walls to bounce the sound around in, likely more. That’s enough to cause permanent hearing damage. “Shotgun owners have been without a real solution for ear protection,” says a Utah-based company called SilencerCo. “Some choose hearing preservation in the form of earmuffs or plugs for relief in controlled environments, but spurn their use in the field or in a home protection scenario, where the ability to detect other sounds is critical.”

With that in mind the company has invented the Salvo 12, “the first and only commercially-viable shotgun suppressor on earth.” Interestingly enough it’s modular, made up of little Lego-like sections of roughly two inches in length that the user can add or subtract to hit their preferred balance of length, weight and noise level.

The noise reduction is pretty nuts:

Speaking of nuts, you’d think that since this is the only product of its kind on the market (if the company’s claims are accurate), it would simply sell itself. However, they’ve opted to create a tongue-in-cheek commercial set in a dystopian, Mad-Max-like future where we will drive around in old Cadillacs shooting drones (sorry Martha) out of the sky. Warning: You will want to turn your sound down—the shotgun may be quiet, but the music is not.

Via Motherboard

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