February 19, 2019 – In Breaking News – The National Interest
The Navy’s SEALs are well-known for their exotic guns—everything from machine gun to grenade launchers … and several iconic, quiet handguns.
The Navy stood up the Sea Air Lands teams in 1962 and quickly sent them to Vietnam to search out the enemy and work with local forces.
The naval operators realized a suppressed pistol would be ideal for many of their most secretive missions.
(Courtesy of Military Arms Channel and YouTube. Posted on May 22, 2018.)
“The value … of suppressed weapons had been noted prior to the teams deploying for combat operations in Vietnam,” noted SEAL historian Kevin Dockery writes in his book Special Warfare Special Weapons .
“But very few weapons of that type were available during the early years of the war.”
At the time, the Pentagon still saw silencers as a highly specialized tool for individual operations.
(The Heckler and Koch Mark 23 may well be the finest production handgun ever made: Match grade accuracy, unparalleled reliability, and size that makes throwing it just as lethal as shooting it all play into it being a fantastic pistol. Courtesy of TFB TV and YouTube. Posted on Oct 8, 2015.)
During World War II, intelligence organizations like the Office of Strategic Services—the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency—were far bigger customers.
Still, the technology was by no means new.
Hiram Maxim—of Maxim machine gun fame—generally get credit for inventing the first sound suppressor for firearms and patenting it in 1909.
The noise of a gun firing comes from gasses popping out from behind the bullet—just like a backfiring car or opening a bottle of champagne.
The devices—which Maxim trademarked as a “silencer”—work mainly by giving all of those fumes a different place to go.
The OSS and their British counterparts ordered a variety of suppressed pistols, submachine guns and rifles during the war, according to a contemporary U.S. Army study.
And these weapons lingered on in both military and CIA arsenals well after the conflict ended.
(The Maxim gun was the first recoil-operated machine gun, invented by the American-born British inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim in 1884. It has been called “the weapon most associated with [British] imperial conquest”. Courtesy of NatGeoTV, Largest Dams and YouTube. Posted on Dec 26, 2013.)
Continue reading… Check Out the U.S. Navy SEALs Deadly ‘Stealth’ Guns
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