WHAM! The concussion from the unsuppressed .300 Win Mag suddenly and violently filled the shooting range and seemed to shake your very insides. I’ll be a man about it and admit I jumped a little. It was the first time we’d shot the Win Mag without the Dead Air Sandman™ on the end and the difference was startling.
“The recoil and the concussion! The sound suppression is great, but the difference in the recoil and concussion with that suppressor on is amazing,” exclaimed one of the testers.
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After being spoiled and getting to shoot .300 Win Mag out of the Barrett MRAD with the Dead Air Sandman™ on, none of us wanted to fire more than a few shots out of the MRAD without the suppressor. The Sandman™ completely changed the shooting experience. It quite frankly made shooting a big gun, to put it simply, enjoyable.
The Mask .22 taken apart with the baffles made from Stellite® laid out
Not only did I get to shoot the guns, I was able to spend a lot of time chatting with the boys behind the scenes at Dead Air and get the down low on just what makes Dead Air suppressors different. If you haven’t met Mike Pappas and Todd McGee, the engineers behind Dead Air, you are seriously missing out. They know their stuff. It was eye-opening listening to their thought process behind designing the suppressors. While it was clear they were certainly concerned about providing the lowest decibel levels possible with their suppressors, they were more concerned with the overall shooting experience. They designed Dead Air suppressors to make the shooting experience as pleasant as possible. Reducing blowback and felt recoil were of particular importance. Many suppressors, while reducing the decibel levels, can actually make the shooting experience more unpleasant because they increase the amount of gas blowback when the gun is fired; meaning, you the shooter, have whatever gas and byproducts are supposed to come out of the end of your barrel blown back into your face. No one wants that. After shooting Dead Air suppressors for myself, I can tell you that not only did I not have to wear ear protection, which was great, but I didn’t experience much blowback and I can’t say enough about Dead Air’s recoil taming capabilities.
Walther PPQ rockin’ the Dead Air Mask-.22™ Suppressor
While the Sandman™ was certainly impressive, I’d have to say that I was most impressed with the Dead Air Mask-.22™ Suppressor on Mike Pappas’ Walther PPQ. The sound suppression was remarkable. At one point we realized that the tinkling of the ejected brass hitting the ground was louder than the sound of the gun being fired. When the gun was fired all you could hear was the movement of the slide. Recoil was nonexistent. Shooting the Walther with the Mask-.22™ Suppressor on the end of it reminded me of the way a BB gun feels and sounds when it is fired. While already an incredibly accurate gun, with the Mask™ on the end it felt like it was impossible to miss and whatever lines of targets, heck, grains of sand I saw in the distance I could hit by simply snapping my fingers and saying, “make it so.”
To sum it all up in a sentence, I was impressed by what I saw. It’s safe to say that these suppressors will indeed de-claw and tame your roaring, wild gun and turn it into that controllable, domesticated beast with a pleasant purr that you want.
