I left this comment at Isegoria, but it doesn't seem to have appeared.
"Nonetheless, you'd be smart to make an attempt to protect your hearing whenever possible. I fired a .357 revolver once outside in the country at a friend's house, and the sound was loud enough to set my ears ringing and effectively deafen me for a few minutes. Every other time I've fired a gun I wore earplugs."
People can say what they want about guns sounding like firecrackers, and maybe they do, if you're not right next to them. As you say, protect your ears.
I am 100% deaf in my left ear from my 2nd stroke but the damage to my right ear is from 40 plus years of shooting and i have always worn hearing protection, my hearing specalist said to me that when he tested my hearing he said that i have typical shooters hearing loss i now use plugs and muffs.
I bet more than 90% of the population has no idea what gunfire really sounds like. I've had the pleasure of hearing 5 inch Naval gunfire (from the bowels of the engine room), as well as Phalanx fire. Quite impressive. Sure would have loved to see/hear/FEEL (with ear protection!) those 16 inch guns on the old battleships. I'm sure that scene from the movie "Under Seige", where Tommy Lee Jones's ears are bleeding after the 16 inch is fired while he was on deck, is probably accurate. 150 lbs. of gunpowder going off at once is a hell of a bang...
I was an Armor officer at Ft Knox in the mid-1970s. We always wore earplugs. As a range/safety officer, I made sure everyone in the classes wore earplugs.
I wear electronic ear protectors at the indoor range I frequent, but it's still loud. At an outdoor range, not so much (for pistols). For rifles, ear protection everywhere! Unfortunately, I don't get to fire main tank guns any more. Not even a Ma Deuce, dammit.
Earplugs generally provide a 10 to 20 percent pressure reduction on your eardrum. "30 dB earmuffs" provide a 1,000 times pressure reduction on your eardrum.
And if you surmised that a "130 dB centerfire carbine" is 1,000 times louder than a "100 dB .22 gallery rifle," you would be correct. But a night behind the counter at the shooting gallery will leave you with your ears ringing.
Permanent, irreversible hearing loss starts at 110 dB. Get muffs, and wear them for anything but hunting and self defense. Unless you want an excuse for ignoring a nagging wife. Or a nagging boss.
Another thing is that most modern digital cameras will drop the sensitivity of the microphone to capture the nature of the sound rather than the volume, so gunfire thus recorded doesn't sound much louder than ambient noise in videos on Youtube et al.
Frankly, I think suppressors should be mandatory, like they are on everything else that produces a lot of noise...
8 comments:
I left this comment at Isegoria, but it doesn't seem to have appeared.
"Nonetheless, you'd be smart to make an attempt to protect your hearing whenever possible. I fired a .357 revolver once outside in the country at a friend's house, and the sound was loud enough to set my ears ringing and effectively deafen me for a few minutes. Every other time I've fired a gun I wore earplugs."
People can say what they want about guns sounding like firecrackers, and maybe they do, if you're not right next to them. As you say, protect your ears.
I am 100% deaf in my left ear from my 2nd stroke but the damage to my right ear is from 40 plus years of shooting and i have always worn hearing protection, my hearing specalist said to me that when he tested my hearing he said that i have typical shooters hearing loss i now use plugs and muffs.
Yes, firearms can be loud.
But for the source to say he "should have been warned" that tanks are loud, or that "Hollywood is to blame" for these things is foolish.
HE is to blame. You can't point to a source of fiction, be it movie, television show, book, or play, and accuse them of lying to you.
Ultimately, there is one person responsible for his safety, and that was him. Not the cavalry, and not Hollywood.
I bet more than 90% of the population has no idea what gunfire really sounds like. I've had the pleasure of hearing 5 inch Naval gunfire (from the bowels of the engine room), as well as Phalanx fire. Quite impressive. Sure would have loved to see/hear/FEEL (with ear protection!) those 16 inch guns on the old battleships. I'm sure that scene from the movie "Under Seige", where Tommy Lee Jones's ears are bleeding after the 16 inch is fired while he was on deck, is probably accurate. 150 lbs. of gunpowder going off at once is a hell of a bang...
I was an Armor officer at Ft Knox in the mid-1970s. We always wore earplugs. As a range/safety officer, I made sure everyone in the classes wore earplugs.
I wear electronic ear protectors at the indoor range I frequent, but it's still loud. At an outdoor range, not so much (for pistols). For rifles, ear protection everywhere! Unfortunately, I don't get to fire main tank guns any more. Not even a Ma Deuce, dammit.
Earplugs generally provide a 10 to 20 percent pressure reduction on your eardrum. "30 dB earmuffs" provide a 1,000 times pressure reduction on your eardrum.
And if you surmised that a "130 dB centerfire carbine" is 1,000 times louder than a "100 dB .22 gallery rifle," you would be correct. But a night behind the counter at the shooting gallery will leave you with your ears ringing.
Permanent, irreversible hearing loss starts at 110 dB. Get muffs, and wear them for anything but hunting and self defense. Unless you want an excuse for ignoring a nagging wife. Or a nagging boss.
Stranger
Another thing is that most modern digital cameras will drop the sensitivity of the microphone to capture the nature of the sound rather than the volume, so gunfire thus recorded doesn't sound much louder than ambient noise in videos on Youtube et al.
Frankly, I think suppressors should be mandatory, like they are on everything else that produces a lot of noise...
Jim
Just to clarify when I said earplugs above, I meant earmuffs like you should use.
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