Somewhere right now, someone is lining up a shot with bare ears and calling it a quiet afternoon.
It will not be quiet. Peak sound pressure levels from firearms run from about 140 to 175 decibels, with most recreational guns sitting between 150 and 165, as documented by Deanna Meinke and colleagues in a review published in Seminars in Hearing. The ceiling NIOSH sets for impulse noise is 140 decibels peak, and by the agency’s own reckoning, a single event at that level uses up an entire day’s allowable exposure. One trigger pull. Day’s budget, gone.
What those numbers actually mean
Decibels are logarithmic, which is a polite way of saying the numbers lie to your intuition. A 160 decibel handgun is not a slightly worse 140 decibel one. It carries roughly a hundred times the sound energy. Standing next to the shooter is barely an improvement either: in outdoor measurements of fifteen recreational firearms, peak levels a metre to the shooter’s left came in between 149 and 167 decibels, which the same Seminars in Hearing review classes as unsafe for bystanders.
So the person holding the rifle and the mate holding the thermos are both in the blast.
The cells you only get once
Down inside the cochlea, sound gets translated into electricity by rows of sensory hair cells. Each one is topped with tiny bristles called stereocilia. When the fluid in the cochlea ripples, the bristles bend, channels open, chemicals rush in, and a nerve signal heads for the brain. It is a beautiful bit of machinery that ships with no spare parts.
Most noise-induced loss comes down to those cells being damaged and dying, and as the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders puts it, unlike bird and amphibian hair cells, human hair cells do not grow back. There is no scarring over and no partial regrowth. A 165 decibel impulse can shear the stereocilia mechanically, and what shears off is simply gone.
Damage that hides from the hearing test
In 2009, Sharon Kujawa and Charles Liberman exposed mice to noise that caused a hearing threshold shift which then recovered completely. Hair cells survived. Hearing tests came back normal. Yet writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, they reported that the nerve terminals contacting those hair cells were lost almost immediately, and the cochlear nerve fibres themselves degenerated over the following months, with ganglion cell counts down by about half two years on.
That is one animal study, not settled fact about humans, and researchers are still arguing about how much of it transfers. But it reframes the usual reassurance. Ears stop ringing after a range session, and everyone relaxes. The mouse data suggests that when the ringing settles down, that doesn’t mean nothing happened. The phenomenon now has a name: cochlear synaptopathy, sometimes called hidden hearing loss.
Why hunters fare worst
The people most exposed are the ones least likely to be wearing plugs. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association reports that only around half of target shooters wear protection every time, while 70 to 80 per cent of hunters never wear it at all, mostly because muffs stop them hearing an animal move.
It is a rational trade in the moment and a terrible one over thirty seasons. High-frequency loss takes the consonants first, so what goes is not volume but clarity. Think of the difference between “s” and “th” in a pub with the footy on.
What the labs can and cannot do yet
Birds, fish and amphibians regenerate lost hair cells and recover function, which has kept an entire field busy since the late 1980s trying to work out how they do it. A 2025 review in Hearing Research sums up the state of play plainly: the mature mammalian cochlea does not naturally produce replacement hair cells, and every treatment on offer restores only partial hearing at best. Cochlear implants and hearing aids manage the loss. Nothing undoes it.
Firearm hearing loss is an odd kind of medical problem, then. The treatment does not exist. The prevention costs about two dollars, comes in a plastic bag at the front counter, and works every time, provided it is in the ear before the first shot rather than after the ringing starts.