Even if the Russians aren’t coming, apparently Americans aren’t willing to take a chance.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) recently released March background check figures for the purchase of firearms and the totals jumped by more than 300,000 from February. Nearly 1.7 million firearms were purchased last month and that continues a trend of 32 consecutive months with more than one million monthly purchases.
“These figures show month-after-month that Americans, by the millions, don’t just speak about the value of their Second Amendment rights—they act on it,” says NSSF’s Mark Olivia.
One person who knows that trend well and who has been tracking the unprecedented wave in gun sales for the last several years is Brandon Maddox, the founder of Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Silencer Central. The company manufactures high quality silencers (also known as firearm sound suppressors) for all manner of firearms and sells them direct to consumers. And they sell a lot of them—more than 100,000 annually. These devices reduce the decibels a shooter absorbs to roughly the level they would if wearing ear plugs. Thanks to Silencer Central’s efforts to revolutionize the process of buying a silencer, the suppressor category is one of the hottest sectors in the entire outdoor and shooting industries.
Maddox is an unlikely catalyst in the rise of the suppressor market. A pharmacist by trade, he met his future wife, Megan, at a pharmacy conference in 1999 and the couple married in 2001. They then relocated from Florida to Sioux Falls in the early 2000’s and worked for Cigna Tel-Drug, a mail-order pharmacy. His experience navigating pharmaceutical sales in many states gave him a valuable background as he contemplated launching his own suppressor business.
Megan, a South Dakota native, came from a family of hunters and shooters, but Brandon didn’t. “If I was going to integrate into the family, I figured I had better learn to navigate in the shooting sports world,” he says. His baptism in the shooting sports began when he started helping ranchers control an overpopulation of prairie dogs whose holes are treacherous for cattle and horses. “Each time I would shoot the rodents would scatter down their holes from the blast of the rifle,” he says. “Then I discovered a suppressor at a local gun show…and that changed everything.”
Suppressors are carefully regulated by the federal government and buying one requires a level of paperwork normally reserved for purchasing a home. Surprisingly, it is far easier to buy guns and ammunition than it is a non-lethal suppressor. The traditional method of purchasing a silencer goes something like this: A customer visits a gun shop, chooses the model he/she wants, buys it, the shop then has it delivered to the store where they hold it until the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) approves the purchase, which can take up to two years. During that time, a buyer hopes the shop doesn’t go out of business and that the store is able to keep track of their purchase. The process is so unbelievably head-scratching that Maddox knew there had to be a better way. “It was clear to me that local gun shops just weren’t set up to sell them—at least not efficiently,” says Maddox.
That’s when Maddox saw his opportunity. “What if I started a company that only sold and distributed suppressors?” he thought. Maddox applied his experience in the pharmaceutical business to his budding suppressor company. “It’s just like tracking the details of a prescription,” he says. “You’ve got to make sure the customer is properly cataloged—right product, serial number, county, paperwork, etc…it has to be very detailed, and most gun shops are used to selling firearms where the purchaser takes possession the same day—not a year or two later.”
Maddox started his suppressor business under the name of South Dakota Silencer in 2005. Possessing a Federal Firearms License, he began selling silencers at gun shows throughout South Dakota. “Silencers are like handguns,” says Maddox, “you can only buy them legally from a licensed dealer, and a dealer has to be licensed in the same state where the customer is a resident and have a physical location there.”
When Maddox launched his silencer business, he bought suppressors from several manufacturers, but those devices were geared more for tactical shooters. “That just wasn’t our clientele,” says Maddox. “Most of our customers were hunters who wanted lighter and quieter suppressors, so they didn’t scare game when they shot.”
Today, in addition to what is manufactured in South Dakota, Maddox has shops in 24 other locations making suppressor parts and five facilities assembling the finished devices. In addition, the company has offices in all 42 states where the use of suppressors is legal, which is why he changed the company name to Silencer Central in 2019. “Every facility is running three shifts to support the demand,” he says.
The uses of suppressors range from any shooter who simply wants to preserve their hearing to state wildlife agents who use them to help control overpopulated whitetail herds in and around residential areas. When it comes to vermin control—be it feral pigs, prairie dogs or coyotes—suppressors are an especially valuable tool, but their use extends to any other form of hunting and shooting enjoyed by America’s 15 million hunters and 130 million gun owners. Their Banish line of suppressors includes seven options for calibers including .22 rimfires, .223 Remington/5.56 NATO platforms, 9mm, .40-.45 caliber handguns, two .30-caliber options, and .46 as well as straight wall cartridges like .450 and .458.
It was Maddox’s revolutionary approach to simplifying the process to obtain a suppressor, however, that has led to the company’s meteoric growth. “Our secret is that we make the process of buying a suppressor super simple,” Maddox told an audience of several thousand hunters in Dallas last January. By attending consumer shows across the country, Maddox has become a silencer evangelist of sorts, for once hunters use his products, most don’t want to go afield without them and they aren’t bashful about extolling the virtues of silencers to their friends either. That is, customers quickly become brand ambassadors and word-of-mouth helped Silencer Central grab roughly a quarter of the 750,000-unit market in 2021, a figure Maddox expects to exceed 1 million by the end of 2022.
“When people stop by our booth to buy a suppressor,” says Maddox, “we take their fingerprints, get their photo, and do the required paperwork for the BATFE. Once a transaction is approved, we mail the suppressor directly to them. We’ve taken what used to be up to a two-year process and condensed it dramatically—usually under eight months.”
The company now has 170 employees and is adding staff continually—100 in the last year alone. They have doubled sales nearly every year since 2005, and they are on track to open a new, modern headquarters in Sioux Falls in June, a fully renovated building that once served as Cigna’s Home Delivery Pharmacy building, his former employer. With a proven distribution model and infrastructure in place, Maddox is eyeing other opportunities to distribute additional products with his unique approach. Not surprisingly, Silencer Central’s meteoric growth has caught the eye of potential investors and strategic partners, so Maddox is weighing options to take the company to the next level.
Ironically, for a brand that specializes in turning down the volume, Silencer Central is making plenty of noise in the burgeoning shooting industry.
