Say you’re bored at the office one day and you decide, hey, let’s make a video where we fire 700 rounds at once through a machine gun with a suppressor and see what happens. You’re really curious to see what red, hot and melted metal looks like.

That’s probably the exact thought process behind this video. Like, almost verbatim. They used a Silencerco SWR branded can and fired 700 rounds through the fully automatic M249 SAW, according to the video’s caption. Between 350 and 400 rounds shot out of the M249, which is normally used in militaries around the world, before the can melted. Which will happen to just about anything if you shoot through it non-stop.

“The gun itself ran wonderful and had no problems,” West Coast Armory wrote. “The only problem we had afterwards was someone was going to have to clean it.”

A suppressor is most often used to reduce the sound a gun makes, and besides using it to obscure which direction a bullet was fired from, it can also have other uses. After prolonged exposure, for instance, users can suffer irreparable hearing damage if they aren’t wearing proper ear protection, and a suppressor can help alleviate that problem a bit.

Of course, a suppressor won’t always completely silence a gun, especially if it’s a machine gun like the M249. For that you’d need to turn to subsonic rounds if you really wanted to scrub the sound. This video does a good job of breaking it down:

There are compromises, obviously. Switching to subsonic ammunition lowers effective range. But think of the tinnitus you’d save yourself from.

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