Engineering Silence
How two Wisconsin brothers took a lifelong interest in firearms and silencers and turned it into one of the oldest and most respected privately held companies in the sound suppressor market of the shooting sports industry.
By Jennifer Williams
It’s not every day that a company prioritizes quality construction and customer service over making a buck–but Griffin Armament in Watertown, Wisconsin, is not just any company.
Started by military veteran brothers Austin and Evan Green in 2005, the firearm and accessory company started out making silencers, and has since expanded into offering AR platform firearms and parts, pistol barrels, muzzle devices, optics and mounts. Griffin Armament offers a transferable lifetime warranty on their products, and are proud to say that over the years, they have honored that commitment to their customers.
“It’s been very rare in our 10 years of doing national sales that we've lost a customer,” says Evan. “It's almost never happened—maybe once or twice possibly. But we do business with the golden rule: Treat others how you want to be treated. And if you conduct yourself that way, it generally works out.”
The decision to go all-in with what started as a hobby business while both served overseas definitely has paid off, with plans for a 40,000-square-foot plant expansion on schedule to be completed by the end of 2023.
One example of their commitment to quality comes from a law enforcement buddy who uses their silencers. “About a month ago, this buddy, a former Marine, sent back one of our silencers for rebuild because the baffles looked they were starting to get eroded inside—which does happen,” says Evan. “Apparently, he’d run it through 50,000 rounds of rapid fire, so, yeah.”
Austin says they were curious how this well-used silencer compared with a new one, so they set up a test before they serviced the product. “So his ‘can’ and our brand new one from the box were only two decibels apart...I mean, we could definitely tell why he sent it back….there was the appearance of really aggressive erosion, but it was very impressive to see only two decibel difference at 50,000 rounds, right?”
It was pretty amazing, agrees Evan, who added that usually, for an AR-15, the accurate service life of the barrel is somewhere around 5,000-7,000 rounds.
But the brothers are committed to providing a quality, lasting product, because it just makes sense all around. A silencer basically is an investment-type purchase for the consumer, says Evan. “People don't want to go through the hassle of the paperwork and additional taxes and fees to buy these more than once, so customer service in our market is kind of king. If you don't have amazing customer service for your product, then people don't want to buy from you because they're investing not only in the product and what it offers, but in the future support of the product—that's been a huge thing because over the nearly 20 years that we've been in the industry now, we've seen quite a few silencer companies come and go. Sometimes they only last two, three years, sometimes even less.”
“So, yeah, consumers are kind of getting wise to that over time and they're saying, if I'm going to buy a silencer, I want to buy it from a company that's been around and that I think will be around in the future,” he says. “I’ll brag about the fact that our company is family owned and operated and we intend it to remain so for a long time. So if you purchase from us then, more likely than not—unless we're dead—we're going to be able to service those products 10 years down the road or more. That alleviates a lot of the fear that consumers otherwise have in terms of what happens if this thing breaks, what happens if I screw it up.”
The brothers are well aware of the red tape and additional expense involved with purchasing a silencer, but say that those trying to suppress the market are missing the point.
“What the sound suppressor does for responsible gun owners is give them an avenue to enjoy their freedom without irritating their neighbors and essentially causing trouble locally,” says Evan. “It acts much like a muffler does for your car.”
Austin agrees, adding, “I lost a significant amount of hearing [while serving] in the army.” He recalls one training exercise in which the leader insisted that ear plugs not be used, because “you train as you fight,” he says. After firing several hundred rounds, Austin discovered he’d lost a significant amount of hearing in his right ear. “[That] reduced my situational awareness, my ability to locate where gunfire was coming from and that’s a major issue for people in the military and law enforcement—if you compromise the capabilities of your people, they're not going to be as effective.”
But the brothers’ interest in silencers and sound suppression back to their childhood in Wales, Wisconsin, where they would rush to the magazine racks to check out the latest issue of Shotgun News when shopping with their mother.
“We would dive into that while our mom was getting groceries,” says Evan, “and we would look at all the surplus parts, kits for guns, the WWII stuff there was stuff floating around in in quite a quite a large circulation at that time. Fast-forward from there and we used pellet rifles, BB guns just like many other Americans growing up with that heritage and tradition of firearms in general. That was when we really got into silencers—when we started hanging out with some former Vietnam Veterans …who had more interesting toys than what you find at your uncles hunting cabin, You know, and that kind of piqued our interest for it. And then we went to the public library a lot, checking out umpteen books on the war and stuff like that in small arms technology. We were hooked.
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Austin remembers pouring over books by Peter Senich and articles by Al Paulson and others. “Those sniper books were very informative about the sniper program from WWI to present time and one of those sniper tools is a silencer,” he says. “You could see the different products that were fielded and read reviews and see exploded diagrams of parts and…those kind of became a foundation for our interest in silencers. We kinda followed the advancements of technology through those magazine articles.”
“We spent a good deal of time with firearms,” says Austin, and that continued into high school. “Not too many years ago, hunting was like the state sport in Wisconsin,” he laughs. “I remember sophomore year in high school and all the guys wearing their blaze orange to school that opening week of deer season. And if you’re using guns so much and you're in a not completely rural atmosphere, diminishing the sound of firearms gave you more freedom to use them. And if you’re out there in the woods, firing hundreds of rounds for fun without using hearing protection, you’ll start to get some auditory exclusion. And when you've read so many books, like we did, that talk about the construction, history and development of silencers, it's kind of a natural segway to begin to screw around with silencers and that led pretty naturally into being a business doing this.”
What the brothers enjoyed about growing their business is not only the thrill of success, but also the freedom of being their own bosses. “It felt very empowering to be able to make decisions every day that can directly help you,” says Even.
Austin adds that the day the company started making money—about eight years in—was especially memorable. “It’s a great day when you turn that corner,” he says. “When you start putting money in your pocket doing what you were dreaming about, what you love—it makes all the difference.”
The Griffin Origin Story
The name Griffin Armaments was a bit of an homage to the Green Brothers’ hometown. “We grew up in Wales, Wisconsin, not too far from here. And it was a Welsh settlement and they had, they had the Wales Griffin on the flag everywhere in town and I just thought it was a cool icon.”
Austin says he wore a flying Wales patch on his body armor during his first deployment with the Wisconsin Army National Guard. “You represent your nation, your state, your community, and it just seemed like a natural fit for our company.”
