Today, the oft-repeated gun shop lore is that up until 1934 when the National Firearms Act passed, silencers were sold widely via mail-order in the Sears Catalog for $5 or $10 — but their use in poaching during the Great Depression and by gangsters during Prohibition caused manufacturing of the harmless hushpuppies to vanish overnight.
Like so many urban legends, there’s half-truths and holes in that narrative. Not to mention the dates don’t line up.
Alcohol prohibition, with its unintended consequences of organized—and violently weaponized—crime, didn’t take place until 1920. And by that time, many states had already banned silencers. The Prohibition-fueled crime wave wasn’t the impetus against them.
Similarly, the Great Depression ran between August 1929 and March 1933. Poaching deer quietly to feed one’s starving family would, indeed, make a palatable explanation for why silencers might be under scrutiny. However, Maxim’s company had already voluntarily exited the silencer business by the spring of 1930 because the sale or use of their namesake product was banned by many states years earlier.
The NFA most certainly didn’t put Maxim out of business overnight; he had already been long chased out of it. All the 1934 NFA law did was merely tie up a two-decade-old anti-silencer period in history with the neat bow of federal homogenization.
BURN THE WITCH
When the silencer was initially invented in 1902, it was enthusiastically admired, then quickly misunderstood and consequentially feared. For a short moment, Maxim’s creation was hailed in the common press as a wonder as worthy as those made by Edison, Ford, Tesla, Westinghouse and the like during that particularly yeasty time in American ingenuity. But newspaper articles turned speedily from admiration to terror. It didn’t take long for panicked politicians to envision “the silent
