How does a gun silencer work? It seems the noisy part would be on the back of the gun where the hammer hits the bullet, not where the bullet exits. (I know nothing about guns)
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The noisy part is definitely not the back of the gun where the hammer hits. That can be heard with trying to fire some empty guns (or dry fire). It’s a click. The bang comes from hot gasses exploding out the front. It’s often compared to popping the cork on a bottle. Behind the bullet there are very hot and expanding burning gasses that come out.
Silencers (or more accurately suppressors, though a company did trademark silencer at one point) spread that expanding energy out over time. An analogy is accelerating a car gently/normally to highway speed vs getting hit from behind and leaving the impact at highway speed. Or popping a balloon vs letting the air out. The end result is similar but the path taken to that new state is different.
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