Silencers

One of the most lethal killing tools in espionage flicks is the dreaded silencer, albeit this is rarely a genre-specific weapon. It's employed in a number of movies and on a range of weapons; in war movies, you'll even find enormous silencers for military-grade, high-caliber sniper rifles that entirely muffle the sound of the shot. It's a handy weapon that fully eliminates the sound, one of the main drawbacks of carrying a rifle in public.

Silencers obviously don't operate that way. As it's impossible to muffle the sound of a gunshot, there aren't even any silencers for guns. Suppressors are used to lower the shot's sound level, which is still loud enough to harm your hearing without the right protection.