Silencing the Beastly .50BMG

Innovative Arms .50BMG Mojave Suppressor mounted on a Barrett M99

The legendary .50BMG is one of those bucket list guns. Heck, that was one thing I was really looking forward to shooting on Top Shot. And shooters who have shot “The Fifty” have experienced the brutal overpressured slap in the face every time you pull the trigger. But taming this blast is as easy as threading on the Innovative Arms Mojave suppressor.

The Bowers Bitty next to the beastly Mojave

Construction

Obviously, the Mojave is a beast of its own. Weighing in at over five pounds and at a length of 14″ and a girth right under 2.5″ it’s definitely the largest silencers in my safe. It has a simple but solid monocore design. The photo below was a cutaway demo part, don’t be mistaken thinking you can disassemble the Mojave.

The hidden interior monocore of the Innovative Arms Mojave

The Mojave includes its own slender muzzle brake allowing QD attachment on the barrel. But as the video shows, it’s a long thread that takes several rotations. It locks in place effortlessly on the ratcheting teeth.

Performance

While I wasn’t able to test it extensively for the video, I was actually beside the Mojave demo at the NFA Review shoot in November. They put 100 rounds through it over the course of the weekend, and every time it went off you knew it because of the deep, long, airy report. However, it was surprisingly comfortable hearing wise. I preferred it more than the supersonic 115 grain 9mm subguns going off on the other side of us.

The Mojave at the NFA Review Shoot

For the above video we stuck to Detroit Ammunition’s subsonic 725 grain .50BMG rounds in our Barret M99 due to range regulations. It’s the same load we use at our Youth Marksmanship Camps. It was crazy quiet. A viewer commented that it should have comparable power to a 12 gauge slug.

As mentioned in the video, recoil does increase when replacing an effective muzzle brake such as was mounted on the Barrett M99, but I’ll accept that trade-off over the brutal blowback that the brake produces. I plan to put together a recoil measuring experiment in the future once the ATF allows me to bring the Mojave home.