Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at a Knight's Armament XM9 suppressor. This is a snap-on suppressor for the Beretta Model 92. It's colloquially called the "Hush Puppy", and that name dates back to the Vietnam War when the first iteration of really an American military suppressed service pistol was developed based on the Smith & Wesson Model 39. Now it was called Hush Puppy because there was some reticence in the standard US Army hierarchy to the idea of giving special forces guys something that
was seen as like an assassin's pistol. A suppressed pistol is ... not really according
to the norms of traditional honourable warfare. So the SEALs, and the other special forces
guys, really needed something like this, and so what they did is they gave it the
name "Hush Puppy" and talked about it being used as a pistol for use on guard dogs. And ignored the fact that they were also
going to be using it on the guards themselves. At any rate, the pistol was adopted,
developed, used in Vietnam. And then this is a later iteration of the same name,
because once again we have a suppressed service pistol. However, this one was developed in the
1980s at the request of the US Air Force. The Air Force was looking to give pilots
a more effective weapon in a survival kit. Should they be shot down they wanted
... something that would give them a little better utility. And the idea was at this point they were
already giving them Beretta M9 pistols, but if you can add a small, simple,
effective suppressor to that package it gives a pilot a much better chance,
or at least potentially a better chance, of being able to use that pistol successfully. Because you're not going to go
play Rambo with just a Beretta M9. If you have to actually shoot it, probably a good chance
you're going to be a lot better off if you can shoot it very quietly. So, this was developed, this was
actually sold to the Air Force. About 3,800 of them were sold to the Air Force, as well as
an unknown number to other sneaky people sort of agencies. But it's a suppressor that has a
number of interesting features to it. So it's not threaded. It is a wipe-based suppressor. ... Well I'll tell you what, let's take a closer look at it,
and I'll tell you what wipes in a suppressor actually are. So here's the suppressor
set as it came from Knights. They have a manual in there, and then the nice
little carry case with all of the requisite components. Using this with a standard pistol requires
a barrel with the appropriate cuts. And then you've got a set of wipes. You've got a spare internal wipe container
along with the two spacers that go in it. And of course, the suppressor itself. There are three things that we want to look at in
particular here. One of them is the slide lock device. One of them is how the suppressor attaches.
And the other is how the suppressor actually works. So let's start at the back with the slide lock. The purpose of the slide
lock is, as the name implies, it locks the slide forward, and it
turns the gun into a single-shot pistol. And there are two reasons
that you would want to do this. The first is that it reduces the noise
of firing for a couple of reasons. You don't have the sound of the pistol cycling ...
which we don't normally think of as being particularly loud. But if the gunshot is being significantly muffled,
that action noise actually is fairly significant. In addition, when you have a suppressor you're
generating additional back pressure in the pistol, and what you'll typically get is
noise of gas escaping, popping, from the chamber when the pistol opens up. And so having ... the slide
locked also prevents that noise. Now originally when the slide lock system was put
into the early Smith & Wesson 39 Hush Puppies, it also had the function of
making the pistol more reliable. When you have a pistol with
a short recoil system like this, but in particular the Browning-style,
tipping-barrel guns, hanging the big weight of a suppressor off the
front of the pistol does a lot to disrupt the dynamics of the pistol actually functioning
properly, and can cause pistols to malfunction. Having a slide lock ensures that the gun's not going to
jam, because it's not even going to be able to cycle. So the idea was you can lock it and then manually
cycle the slide, which is easily done reliably. You know that that will work because it's
not depending on the recoil energy of the gun. And then get your next shot, and that works
nicely in conjunction with the reduced noise. However, since the Vietnam period there have been
devices developed, really it's one, it's called a Nielsen device, which is basically a spring-loaded
buffer in the suppressor attachment, which allows the barrel to cycle backward normally
independent of the weight of the suppressor. It's very clever, it's a subject for a separate video,
but as a result we don't really need to lock slides, we don't really have to worry about the reliability
of pistols with suppressors so much anymore. Now I do want to point out, this particular [part]
on the Air Force issue pistols was of course nitrided black to match the finish of the guns. This particular one is an aftermarket addition to this pistol,
and for whatever reason they decided to leave it in the white. But the design and the function are
identical to that of the original Knight's XM9. So you can see I've got my
trigger finger here to operate it. You push it up and the slide can't move. Pull it down and the slide can. Now the second thing to take a look
at here is how the suppressor attaches. This ... is what's called by
Knights a snap-on suppressor. It is quicker to attach than a threaded
suppressor and easier as well, you don't have to worry about cross threading,
you don't have to worry about it coming loose. What we have is a spring-loaded
plunger, ... pull this off. And the barrel that is used ... typically for a suppressor you would replace
your normal barrel, this guy, with a threaded barrel. Well instead here we replaced it with a barrel
that has these two scalloped cuts on either side. And that works in conjunction with a pair
of pins that have a matching cutout. So when I push this up, it can slide right onto the barrel, and snaps right in place. Conveniently the top of this snap
attachment functions as your rear sight. There's a front sight bead on the suppressor. So instead of trying to deal with
modifying the sights on the gun, they just added a separate set of sights to
the suppressor that you can use [instead]. You actually kind of get two sight pictures with the gun.
It's a little funky until you get a little practice with it, but that's a very effective way of getting what is,
I should say, a reasonable but not great sight picture. Because this isn't tightly threaded on, you
probably can't see it, but this does wobble a little bit. There's a little bit of play to it. When you take the suppressor on
and off your zero is going to change. ... Like there's no good way to zero these,
they are not adjustable. And wipes, which we will get to in a moment, make
it very difficult to ... repeatably zero a pistol like this. So it's not particularly accurate, either in terms
of where the group is or how big the group is. But that's an acceptable trade-off for the
suppression effect that you get from it. You're not supposed to be
trying to snipe things with this. Now we can go in and take a look at
how the suppressor itself actually works. We do have markings on the top here.
It is a Model XM9, made by Knight's Armament. That probably would not have been
marked on the original Air Force ones, but they are on this. We'll get into that in a moment. Now we can unscrew the front end.
This blue thing is a rubber O-ring to help seal it. And what we've got is this container of wipes. The rest of the suppressor is just a hollow empty tube. There's nothing else in there. So in
practice when this is assembled you've got one really big expansion chamber
here, and then the bullet starts hitting wipes. Let's take this apart as well. Drop that out, there's the front end, and
there's everything that goes into this. So what we have in practice is a stack like this. We have polyethylene rubber wipes
(as they're called, they are basically washers) here. And the idea is when you fire, the bullet is
actually going to poke a hole through these. Some wipe suppressors ... come
with wipes that have a little X cut in them to make it easier
for a bullet to create a hole. On the XM9 they are just totally solid, and that means
... no gas can get through this until the bullet goes through. And these tend to seal back up a little bit
behind the bullet after it passes through. You've got three of them and then a spacer, so
you've got a little bit of another expansion chamber. Then a further three wipes, then
another spacer, and then two final wipes. Now the way this works is your first shot is by far the
quietest, because there are no holes in any of these. When you go to fire your second shot you've
now punched a hole through all of them, but it's not that big, I think it's resealed itself a little bit.
Your second shot is still very quiet. But by the time you get to about 25 shots through, you basically have a bullet-sized hole
running through the whole length of the thing. And that significantly reduces its effectiveness
and the gun becomes substantially louder. So when it comes to recreational
shooting that's not great, because once you've put about 25 rounds through,
if you want it to work properly again you have to replace these with
a new set, like we have here. Now for the purposes of the Air Force
that's really not a problem. Like you don't expect a downed pilot to go Rambo
with his Beretta and destroy the entire Iraqi army. Or wherever he is. And, frankly, he's not carrying
that much ammunition anyway. And as a nice sort of unintended consequence,
or perhaps intended consequence, if your pilot does get captured and the enemy ends
up with this fancy, high-tech, suppressed pistol, well it's not going to be very suppressed for all that long.
Unless they happen to have their own supply of new wipes. So, that is the idea of wipe suppressors. The alternative are baffles, which are
basically permanent baffles inside the suppressor tube that serve to
redirect the gas and delay its expansion. Alright, so we are actually going to do a
little bit of shooting with the Hush Puppy. So, I'll pull my ear out and I won't
need it because of the suppression. Snap that there right on there. And I'm going to go ahead and use the slide lock, so we won't even get the mechanical
sound of the gun operating, in theory. There we go. So this is going to operate as a
single shot pistol. I fire, it will not cycle, it will not eject. I will have to manually unlock it, cycle the action. And this is our first round.
So we're shooting through wipes. That's quite quiet. Do you hear that? I don't know if that came
through on camera, but you actually got a pfffump of residual pressure because the wipes in this are still intact enough
that even after a bullet goes through them, the can's holding a little bit of pressure
that comes out when I open the slide. That's really cool, and really quiet. Let's see if we get another pop. Yup, I hope that
comes through on camera it's just a little pfffump. I don't know that I'm actually hitting the target though, because we're not using the pistol sights,
we're using the sights on the suppressor itself. You can actually hear the gas hissing out
through the baffles after each shot. Pop psssst. Alright, now let's try it without the slide lock. See how much noise the mechanical
operation of the gun actually adds to this. That actually adds quite a lot of noise. It's still really quiet, but compared to
when the gun's locked and single shot. And I can actually feel gas blowing back onto my hand because of the amount of back pressure generated
by that suppressor. It's an interesting experience. There we go, finally managed
to hit one on the very last round. So that is the Knight's Armament
Hush Puppy suppressor, very cool. Alright, now that we've done some shooting, let's
go ahead and take a look at how the baffles look. You can see we've got a nice ol' hole in the front there. So there's our big ol' hollow expansion chamber. And then this guy, which is (there we go) not too gummed up. Actually not as dirty as
I would have expected either. Alright, let's poke these guys out. There's our stack of baffles,
plus the one that was at the front. And you can see that that is what
happens over the course of a full magazine. So actually slightly more, I think
we put 21 rounds through this. So this is of course why these
become less effective as you use them. The hole gets bigger and
bigger as you shoot through it. Interesting that this middle set
of baffles, some of these just have different sized permanent holes in them
than others. That's kind of interesting. So there's the whole set of them laid out now,
this is, I believe, the one that was at the very front. Interestingly, you can actually reorder these
and re-stack them back in the suppressor, and extend the life a little bit by
putting the ones with the smallest holes in place of ones, like the very front one,
that are the most important. So in general though, lifespan on this
is supposed to be about 25 rounds. And then you just go in with a new
set of clean wipes to replace them. ... For recreational shooting that's a
gigantic pain and not a good solution, but for what this pistol was actually designed for,
a short functional lifespan is really just fine. The original contract for these
guns was in the mid-1980s. And the same suppressor idea would end up
also being applied to the Offensive Handgun Program that came in the early 1990s.
That of course ended up being a .45. But Knight's Armament did actually have a
significant role in the development of the suppressors for the HK Mark 23 that eventually won that bid.
Although ultimately not really in this form. They came out in 2018 and re-released a couple of
hundred of these suppressors onto the civilian market, probably new old stock that they hadn't sold originally. And that's where this particular one comes from, as well
as most of the other ones that are out there right now. So it's ... really cool. A little bit of a look
back at older suppressor technology, because this style isn't something that's used a lot
these days, but it certainly has its applications. Including the Air Force application, for
which I think it was actually pretty well suited. Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
Damn I could smash some hush puppies rn
“He has an AN94 and a Makarov, me must be a Russian!”
Slide lock devices seem overcomplicated to me. Just hold your thumb firmly over the back of the slide. EZ peezy