Bought a hk uspc 45 man is it loud!!!!!! Got a question.

Ok. I'll be the contrarian here. I think you were smart to fire the pistol without ear protection just to see how it sounds. No, it didn't permanently affect your hearing and firing it several more times won't either.

No, I'm not saying do it a lot and yes, I wear ear protection but for many years while not shooting more than a few hundred rounds a year, I never owned ear protection. No body did back then. Most of us couldn't afford to shoot enough to cause a hearing loss. Can I hear?.......A knat scratch his *** at 100 yards!

Let's have some common sense here...Pleeeeeese! You all sound like the radical militants on other subjects that I have heard.

Wear um but don't freak over a few times without um. I think what you did was a good idea and I advocate it for everybody that shoots. For one thing, it will hopefully prevent you doing something worse which really might injury your ears like firing in a closed space........Like out of a car window or in a small room. Now you know, it's going to be really bad if you do. So you learned something.

PigPen
 
I would think that a .40 would sound louder than a .45 because of that sonic clap thing. Don't sell your USP45C! if thats what you are intending to do. It is one fine pistol.
With the noise issue, I understand your concern but don't worry about it. I heard gun fire without hearing protection, (from a distance though), and the 9/40s sound louder than the .45. The 9/40s has this sharp "crack" while the .45 sounds more lower without that "crack".
ST
 
HUH?

They all cause damage with one shot fired.

To me, .45acp is much louder than 9mm without ears on.

5-inch 1911 230 grain mil ball.
Glock 17 124 grain mil ball.
 
If one shot damages your ears and results in a hearing loss, then I guess we now have the long awaited answer to what caused deafness in a whole generation of young men when they went off to WWII. That explains why none of our fathers and grandfathers could hear. Because of course, none of them had hearing protection.

Not to mention explosives other than rifle and pistol discharges that they were exposed. Hum....


Hearing loss results from the *chronic* exposure to loud noise. The operative word here is chronic. Like standing next to a loud machine for a year or years. A single loud noise or blast might damage (perforate) a tympanic membrane but it would have to be more than the discharge of a pistol at arms length and pointed away from you. Then when the tympanic membrane healed, the hearing would in all probability not be detectible altered.

Get a grip. Get the facts.

PigPen
 
Have to disagree with you PigPen. One shot will cause hearing damage. Very slight hearing damage, probably not easily measureable, but some nonetheless.

And the issue isn't just the tympanic membrane, its the scilia.

M1911
 
Everyone is different. Some can smoke till they are 101 years old. some dont make it past 25.

I still think some peoples hearing may be damaged while some arent.

Shutting my computer down without using the "shutdown" feature may, or may not cause damage to my hard drive. But why take the chance if the option is available?

Shooting a handgun without protection may cause hearing damage. Why not just use ear protection?

If none is available, I just plug my ears with ammo. Its better than nothing. (even though 45ACP is hard on the ears too)


I hope that made sense :D
 
I can't stick live .45 rounds in my ear canal. That just can't be right. Indeed, I have small ears and nothing larger than 9mm would fit. Surely you could use a paper napkin or perhaps pocket lint. Do you need to practice that badly?! :)

This is another argument for using a suppressor, if it is legal where you live and you can afford it.
 
If you really must shoot without ear protection, atleast have your mouth open when you do. This is not to make you look silly but it helps vent some of the sound waves through the Eustachean tube and out the mouth. Your tympanic membrane will still be affected but not as bad as having you mouth closed. If that pressure is not vented out the ET, then that pressure will get trapped between the tymp. mem. and the cochlea and vestibular appartus, something is going to give and I think the tym. mem. will be the first to go. More pressure can even cause disruption in the VA making you dizzy, disoriented, nausea, stuff like that.
It helps even more if you yell while you are shooting but that is kinda funny just imagining it.
ST
 
I suffer from tinnitus, it was from firing ONE .45acp indoors without ears on. I never heard the shot, but later I noticed I was saying HUH? a lot. And the crickets I was hearing were not crickets. :)

Whoever said one shot does not do damage, I dare you to fire a .45acp indoors without ears on.
 
1911,

I can't help asking the obvious question. If you can't hardly measure it, how do you know it happens? :)

Who told you guys this stuff.

P.S. I do not advocate habitually shooting without ear protection. Chronic loud noise (usually high pitched noises at a higher frequency often found in machinery) will damage hearing.

As relates to cigarette smoking, it will statistically correlate with many diseases. It has been measured and proven many times. Does anybody have any studies proving, statistically or otherwise that a solitary exposure to pistol shooting causes a hearing loss? I don't think so.

I hate to go on and on because I do not oppose ear protection and use it myself regularly. I think I just have a problem with people passing along mis-information..... and particularly over reacting. You see it so much in our society now a days. Next thing you know, the range will require a helmet!

PigPen

P.S. As I recall, without getting up to go verify my memory, the cillia have nothing what so ever to do with hearing. Cillia are the hair like projections in the labyrinth that function to collect positional information and relay it to the cerebellum.
 
I don't think the .45 ACP is as loud as some of the other calibers out there. Seems strange, but the caliber that hurts my ears the most is the .357 mag. It has a sharper crack to it than some of the other cartridges. I've noticed the .45 ACP and .44 mag don't seem as damaging as the .357. They both have more of a dull boom than anything.

I would encourage you to keep the USP and shoot it always with ear and eye protection. You know how it will be without the hearing protection, so you don't need to try that again. Truth is any adequate self protection cartridge is going to do some hearing damage if you fire it indoors (in the case of an intruder).


Shake
 
Misinformation is indeed DANGEROUS!!!

Go to your favorite search engine, input loud noise and hearing loss- here's what I got from http://www.google.com:

http://ww2.med.jhu.edu/otolar/disorders/hearing/noise.html
http://www.jeffersonhospital.org/show.asp?durki=5091

When the boys and girls at Johns Hopkins say that "hearing loss can occur after a one-time exposure to a loud noise or after repeated exposure to varying loud noises" and specifically cite "firing guns," I think we all had better listen up.
 
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