It seems like every silencer manufacturer has their own silencer mount/flash hider thing. AAC has their 51-tooth adapter, Gemtech has their lug-based mount and Surefire has their odd smooth muzzle brake. It’s a necessity in a world where silencers are expensive and the regulatory rigmarole surrounding them is so tedious as to make babies cry, where people generally buy one silencer and use it on all of their guns. But that’s not the world that Kevin Brittingham, founder of AAC and new head of SIG’s R&D envisions . . .
To Kevin, there’s no reason to ever take a silencer off a gun. In his vision of the future, guns and silencers would be two components of the same system — designed to work with each other, not tacked on like an afterthought. Integrally-suppressed firearms are something that Kevin has been pushing for ever since the early days at AAC, as evidenced by such attempts as their integrally-suppressed 10/22 rifle that they tried to market shortly after being bought by Freedom Group.
Tack onto that the benefits of direct thread attachment and things get pretty serious. “When you have a mount” Kevin says, “that’s one more thing you need to worry about, one more thing to align. With a direct thread attachment, everything lines up so we can make the bore diameter smaller.” And when everything lines up, the gun is more accurate and the silencer more efficient.
As he tells it, one of his German engineers had just finished testing the two-chamber silencer for the new MPX and finally saw the light, “Every gun should have one of these,” he said. He didn’t understand why anyone would want this to be restricted, instead of mandatory.
To further his dream of eliminating QD mounts, Kevin has been advocating streamlining of the NFA paperwork process for years. His vision has always been that silencers would be the next “big thing” in firearms. And from the volume of NFA paperwork these days it looks like his predictions are finally coming true. The last barrier to Kevin’s plans for integrally suppressed guns everywhere is the snail-like pace of ATF approval process, but with the NFA branch making promises of hiring more staff and re-coding their website we might be inching closer to making that dream a reality.
Until the wait times for NFA items are measured in weeks rather than months, Kevin admits that there might still be a place for the quick-attach mount. “I can understand if you have only one silencer that you move between guns,” he allowed, and has been developing a new quick-attach mounting system for SIG SAUER’s silencers to fill exactly that role. But to him it’s a flawed concept from the start — direct thread really is the way to go.