Rimfire

A rimfire can lives a different life than a centerfire can, and it starts with how dirty the cartridge is. The .22 LR fires an unjacketed lead bullet over a small charge of fast powder, coated in wax lube, and it does all of this at low pressure and low temperature. The result is that lead, wax, and unburned powder pack into the baffles as solid fouling rather than getting burned off or blown clear the way a hot, high-pressure centerfire round largely self-cleans its can. A centerfire suppressor can run for thousands of rounds sealed and nearly maintenance-free. A rimfire can fouls steadily and on a schedule, and it will eventually gum up if you ignore it.

That low pressure is also why a rimfire can can be so light. There is very little gas and very little heat to contain at the muzzle, so there is no need for thick walls or exotic blast baffles in Inconel or Stellite. A dedicated .22 can is often a thin tube of aluminum or titanium that weighs only a few ounces, which is part of what makes a rimfire host so pleasant to carry and shoot. The can is built around the gentle pressure curve of the cartridge, not against it.

Here is the part worth updating your assumptions on. Rimfire cans were traditionally built to come apart so you could knock the baffles out and pick the caked lead out by hand, and for years a user-serviceable design was treated as a requirement. The arrival of effective lead-dissolving cleaners changed that math: you can now soak a sealed can and dissolve the fouling out without ever disassembling it. A take-apart can is still a nice convenience, but it is no longer a dealbreaker, which opens the door to simpler, lighter sealed designs.

The payoff is that a .22 can be the lightest, cheapest, and quietest can you own, as long as you respect that it needs cleaning a centerfire can does not. Our goal is to help you pick a rimfire can that matches how often you actually want to maintain it.

Chasing quiet, start here. Bolt actions are the ideal rimfire host for the same reasons they are the ideal centerfire host. There is no gas system to overpressure and no automatic cycling to disrupt, so the action stays locked through the entire shot and the can changes nothing about how the rifle feeds, fires, or extracts. Nothing vents back at your face, and with no port dumping gas there is no action noise to add to the shot.

The cartridge does the rest. Subsonic .22 LR leaves the muzzle below the sound barrier, so there is no supersonic crack to chase downrange, only the muffled report at the gun. Standard-velocity loads sit right at that line and can slip past it depending on the load, the barrel, and the weather, so dedicated subsonic ammo, which is cheap and easy to find, is the surer bet. Because most bolt actions have that longer 16" barrel, the velocity is usually enough to push standard velocity into the super sonic range. Pair a subsonic round with a bolt .22 and a good can and you reach the quietest setup most shooters will ever fire, the genuine "Hollywood quiet" everything else only approaches. The lever you control here is ammo: high-velocity .22 LR goes supersonic and brings the crack back, so pick your load deliberately.

The trade-offs are mild. The can adds a little weight and length out front, which shifts barrel harmonics and will move your point of impact, so plan to re-zero with the can installed. And of course you are working the bolt by hand, so follow-up shots are slow by design. The payoff is a rifle that suppresses cleanly and reliably with nothing to tune. If your goal is the simplest, quietest possible host, a bolt .22 is the answer.

Semi-auto rimfires like the Ruger 10/22 are almost all simple blowback, and that single fact shapes the whole experience. The bolt is held closed by nothing but its own mass and spring pressure, so it begins opening the instant pressure climbs. Add a can and you raise backpressure, and because rimfire is so dirty, the action now vents a steady stream of lead, carbon, and unburned powder straight back toward your face and hands. The classic suppressed 10/22 session ends with a gritty bolt, a black trigger hand, and a grin.

Unlike a centerfire gas gun, a .22 does not make enough pressure to batter itself or to demand an adjustable gas block, so there is not much to tune here. Backpressure can even help cycle weak subsonic ammo that a bare blowback gun would short-stroke. The real management is a cleaning schedule and accepting the blowback as the cost of doing business. Some shooters add a heavier bolt or an aftermarket buffer to slow things down, but most just shoot it and clean it.

The payoff is the most fun you can have suppressed: a high-volume plinker that stays hearing-friendly while you burn through a brick of ammo. Just know going in that this is the dirtiest way to shoot a suppressor, and plan your cleaning around it. Our goal is to help you match a can and an ammo choice that keep a blowback .22 running reliably, no matter the host.

A semi-auto rimfire pistol is one of the friendliest suppressor hosts in existence, and the reason is its action. Guns like the Ruger Mark IV, the Browning Buck Mark, and the S&W Victory are fixed-barrel blowback designs: the barrel never moves, so unlike a centerfire tilting-barrel pistol there is no recoil cycle for the can's weight to fight. That means no Nielsen device, no booster, and no piston to tune. You thread a light can directly onto a barrel that stays put, and it simply works. (For why centerfire handguns are not this easy, see the Pistols article.)

The catch is the same dirtiness as the semi-auto rifle, only closer to your hands. A blowback action sitting inches from your grip vents lead and gas right back at you, so the gun and your hands get filthy fast. You will also want a threaded muzzle, which many rimfire pistols now ship with, and tall enough sights to clear the can if you intend to use the irons.

The payoff is the closest thing to Hollywood quiet you can hold in one hand, on a host that is light, cheap to feed, and free of the booster hardware a centerfire can demands. Our goal is to help you pair a simple, light can with a fixed-barrel rimfire pistol so it stays quiet and reliable, no matter the host.

Pump and lever .22s suppress as cleanly as a bolt gun, and for the same reason: the action is worked by hand and stays closed through the shot. A lever rifle has no gas system and nothing automatic to disrupt, so the can adds no blowback and no cycling drama. Pair that with subsonic .22 LR and you get the quiet of a bolt gun with an action that is, frankly, more fun to run.

The one real hurdle is the muzzle. Many lever and pump .22s ship without threads, and a tube magazine or barrel band under the barrel can make threading a job for a gunsmith rather than a quick swap. There is a second, easy-to-miss catch with tube-fed guns: because you load these magazines from the front, pulling the inner tube out near the muzzle, a mounted suppressor can sit right in the way and block access entirely. On some rifles you will have to pull the can just to top off, which takes the fun out of a quiet plinking session. So before you fall in love with a particular rifle, confirm you can either buy it factory-threaded or have the muzzle cut, and check that the suppressor will not foul the magazine tube when it is time to reload. The payoff is a charming, genuinely quiet plinker that rewards the extra step of getting the barrel threaded right.

The rimfire family does not end at .22 LR. Cartridges like .17 HMR, .17 WSM, and .22 WMR (.22 Magnum) share the rimfire case head, but they are a different animal under a can. They are supersonic by design: a .17 HMR leaves the muzzle well above the sound barrier, so even a perfect can only erases the muzzle blast and leaves the bullet's ballistic crack snapping downrange. You can suppress them, but you cannot make them quiet the way a subsonic .22 is quiet.

Two practical notes follow from that. First, these cartridges run hotter and at higher pressure than .22 LR, so confirm your can is actually rated for the magnum rimfire you want to shoot; a .22 LR-only can is not a safe assumption here. Second, bore matters: a .22-bore can will pass a .17 bullet fine but with a little lost efficiency, while a dedicated .17 bore is tighter and quieter on that round. The upside is that the jacketed bullets in .17 HMR foul far less than the bare lead of .22 LR, so the can stays cleaner.

The payoff is real even though the result is not silence. Knocking down the muzzle blast still protects your hearing and tames a sharp, painful little cartridge into something pleasant to shoot. Just calibrate your expectations: with the magnum rimfires you are managing blast and saving your ears, not chasing the movie-quiet that only a subsonic round delivers.