Do Silencers Look Good with Skinny Jeans?

Meet the gun-loving, indie-music-listening, hipster-beard-growing millennial entrepreneurs disrupting the gun industry.

- John Albert

Out on the horizon, halfway to Cuba, jagged streaks of lightning illuminate the still waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Inside a Key West resort, a group of men congregate outside a private dining room. Several have the noticeable bulge of barely concealed firearms. A few are dressed in pastels approximating the look of the 1980s television show Miami Vice.

The crowd in the dining room is almost exclusively white and male. There are some obvious ex-military men, an assortment of press and a few punkish action-sports types. On a small stage are several covered display cases framed by two large video screens. An intense-looking man in his 30s named Josh Waldron takes the podium. He is a co-founder of SilencerCo, a company that designs and sells high-tech gun silencers. He and his colleagues are in Key West to introduce several new products: the Hybrid, a silencer  the Hybrid, a silencer compatible with pistols, rifles and submachine guns; the Radius, a mounted range finder; and their newest product, a futuristic, angular-looking pistol with a built-in silencer called the Maxim 9, which is a dead ringer for RoboCop’s service weapon.

But these tools of combat are being target-marketed to an unexpected crowd. Imagine a New York City coffeehouse. The customers are in their 20s and ironically tattooed. They sip fair-trade coffee and stare at a line of silvery MacBooks. Now imagine a large percentage of them armed with concealed weapons. Sure, it’s an unlikely scenario. But if middle-class kids raised on first-person-shooter games such as