When you go to the shooting range, you wear glasses to protect your eyes, and hearing protection to protect your ears. This is because guns blast all kinds of things out into the air and potentially your eyes, and they’re so loud they can cause damage to your hearing.
So what happens when a cop on the street has to fire his gun? Why, he risks damage to his vision and his hearing, that’s what. I SAID HE RISKS DAMAGE TO HIS… yeah, you get the joke.
That’s why we use suppressors, and partly why we use frangible rounds. A suppressor is basically a “silencer” for submachine guns, like our hoses. We need to hear the bad guys crawling around, which means we can’t wear those big, 1970’s like headset earmuffs. Our helmets do have hearing protection built in, and we also have electronic amplifiers that increase the sound levels. The thing is, we don’t want our guns making all the noise and masking the sounds of the bad guys, so we try to quiet our guns.
Likewise, we don’t want bullets and junk coming back at us. When a bullet hits a rock, it may ricochet, or even break apart causing multiple fragments to come back at us. By using frangible rounds, or bullets that turn basically to dust upon impact, there’s nothing significant coming back at us. That means our eyes and asses are safe.
Mr. FPSRussia put together a cool video here that shows you how a silencer/suppressor can diminish the noise a weapon makes. In the same video, he also shows how the frangible rounds we use add to shooter safety while still delivering maximum damage to our targets.