LAS VEGAS -- SilencerCo turned heads at this year's SHOT Show in Las Vegas with its latest prototype of the Maxim 9, a futuristic-looking 9mm pistol that sort of resembles the gun from the "RoboCop" movies.
"This is the world's first integrally suppressed 9mm handgun that is hearing safe with all types of 9mm ammunition," Jason Schauble, a marketing official for the company, said on Monday at range day the Boulder Rifle & Pistol Club outside Vegas. "It's definitely the coolest thing you'll see this week. I guarantee it."
Designers indeed looked to futuristic science-fiction movies for ideas, including "RoboCop" and "Judge Dredd," but ultimately settled on a unique design with a thick, rectangular front end and the operating mechanism in the rear of the weapon, Shauble said.
"I've got a 3.5-inch fixed barrel, so it's still accurate -- I can still get the velocity I need," he said. "But I've got as much room up front to suppress the actual noise."
When asked what makes the design unique, Schauble said, "People have done intergrally-supressed pistols before -- the Chinese, the Russians -- but they did it with a .32-caliber cartridge, which is not going to kill anything, or it's a you-can-only-use-this-bullet, right? -- I can only use a subsonic, light round, at 20 feet in close range or something like that. So we made it so I can use 124-grain-plus-p-plus jacketed hollow point, which is the loudest 9mm pistol cartridge in this configuration."
The weapon uses Glock magazines and can accommodate any type of after-market sights, he said. While a previous prototype was unveiled at a product launch event in September, this second version is "much closer to what our final iteration will look like," he said.
SilencerCo, based in West Valley City in Utah, plans to ship the product later this year, with an expected retail price of between $1,500 and $2,000.
--Brendan McGarry can be reached at brendan.mcgarry@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Brendan_McGarry.
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