Silent Legion 9mm Suppressor

This suppressor was featured and tested in Patrick Sweeney's review of the FN 509 Tactical 9mm pistol. Read his review of the FN 509 T here.

There are a lot of new suppressor makers out there, but some of them, while “new” as suppressor makers, are not new to making suppressors. The Guy In Charge (honest, that’s his title on his business card) Ed Schoppman has been making silencers for a number of years, before striking out on his own and making suppressors the way he wants them made.

The Silent Legion 9mm suppressor is made of aluminum to keep the weight down. This makes any pistol with the Silent Legion suppressor on it less nose-heavy than others might be. It does not preclude the use of a booster or piston mount. The just-over-eight ounces of the silent Legion suppressor is still enough to “stall” the cycling of some pistols, and so Silent Legion has built the spring-mounted piston system into the rear cap assembly.

The direct-thread part of the model designation is because there is no QD mount system possible for a pistol-mount suppressor. If you put some sort of QD mount onto a pistol barrel, you couldn’t get it out of the slide for cleaning. Since screwing a pistol-caliber suppressor onto a handgun is no big deal, so no-one makes one that I know of.

Installing the Silent Legion 9mm suppressor was a piece of cake. Simply unscrew the thread protector, screw on the Silent Legion, and give it a quick wrist-snap at the end to tighten it. After a few shots, check to make sure it is still tight, and snug it again if need-be.

The piston system inside the rear cap acts to let the suppressor “float” on the mount. As the pistol recoils to the rear, the suppressor doesn’t. That compresses the spring, and once it has soaked up all the energy it is going to, the spring expands, delivering that stored energy back into the system. The timing of the jolt makes up for the weight of the suppressor, and the pistol cycles. The odd thing about it is that despite adding 8.4 ounces to the weight of the pistol, it will feel like it is recoiling harder than it would without the suppressor. Welcome to the world of Newtonian physics, and the timing of recoil. That’s life with a suppressed pistol.

The piston has notches machined around its forward ring, and the tube indexes on a notch. You can push the tube forward and rotate the tube slightly to get it to index on a different notch, if you wish. You do this to adjust point of impact, should you have a slight zero shift with a suppressor on your pistol. (These things can vary quite a bit.)

There are no guarantees. Your pistol could be the culprit (most zero shifts are due to the pistol, not the suppressor), and the ammunition also gets a vote as well. Pistols and suppressors are a perfect example of the Henny Youngman Principle of ballistics; if it causes a problem, don’t do that.

I had no problem with accuracy or zero shift in my afternoon of testing, but the Silent Legion suppressor is going to get a full testing and write-up of its own in a future issue.

Silent Legion 9mm Suppressor Specs

• Length: 7.2"
• Diameter: 1.25"
• Weight: 8.4 oz.
• Materials: Aluminum
• Mount: ½-28 piston
• MSRP: $795
• Manufacturer: Silent Legion Suppressors, SilentLegion.com, (336) 202-9013

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