WaPo:Tim Kaine's claim the Las Vegas shooter was only stopped because he lacked a silencer

[Sailor65x1]

2. Actually, you're missing an important point and he's right

You're talking sound pressure, which behaves as an inverse square to distance. At the 400 yards to his targets, the sound pressure would only be about 70dB, and from his window to street level, not much more. And that's with no attenuation from structures.

If he were using a suppressor, even a 30dB drop would have made his shots almost undetectable at range, and only moderately detectable at street level below. Inside the building, the team tracking him definitely would have had a much harder time.

Remember, too, that structural attenuation also has the effect of impairing directional detection of sound.

I think that Kaine is making a decent point here.