Zach Clark isn’t the first person to ever try using a potato as a gun silencer, but he recently became the first to have it legally approved as a silencer by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). He reportedly did it to point out the absurdity of the law that allowed him to do it, a law that now allows anyone to submit their own silencer designs, regardless of how crazy they might be.
“It’s a good way to highlight to normal people that like, ‘Yeah, this is dumb. ‘This whole law is kind of dumb,” Clark told The Reload. “There are other people who have talked about submitted forms for pillows. One is particularly funny because, for the documentation, it’s just a picture of Mike Lindell holding a My Pillow. People have submitted forms for Monster Energy cans. So, there are definitely a lot of people who are going that angle.”
A National Firearms Act (NFA) tax cut enacted at the beginning of the year as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is what made Zach Clark’s achievement possible. It lowered the cost of submitting a silencer design for legal approval to $0 and digitized the entire process. This opened the floodgates for some of the craziest designs imaginable.
Clark himself is not entirely sure how his spud silencer was approved. He submitted three potato suppressors for ATF approval, but only two were approved, which also happened with other 3D-printed designs he submitted, even though the documentation was identical for all of them. The gun owner thinks that designs could be approved randomly because ATF staff simply can’t go through all the applications they receive.
“Serial number Samwise01 was denied, but Tate001 and Tate002 were approved,” Zach Clark said. “It happened with some of my 3D-printed suppressors, too. I had three that were denied that used the exact same documentation as the other 40 that were approved. So who knows? I’m assuming with what’s going on at the ATF right now, they’re just flying through them. So, there might not even be a thought process. The person could just be clicking, yes, no, because there’s chaos over there.”
A number of YouTube accounts have tested potatoes as gone silencers, including licensed manufacturer SilencerCo., and all have reported unimpressive results. But Zack Clark isn’t interested in the effectiveness of Tate001; he’s just trying to have some fun, and he says doing so while “taking on the government is the best way to do it”.
