Anything preventing me from using silent kill with firearms?
Silent Kill (Combat)
You are quite adept at killing your prey without making noise or alerting others.
Prerequisite(s): Stealth 12 ranks; assassinate advanced slayer talent or ninja master trick.
Benefit: When you kill a creature during a surprise round, you can attempt a Stealth check, opposed by the Perception checks of potential observers, to prevent them from noticing your action and subsequently identifying you as the assailant.
There's no hard rules about this so DMs can figure out what the DC should be on a case-to-case basis. By not giving a hard rule, it becomes impossible for a PC to consistently assassinate NPCs because all that needs to happen is the DM saying "no."
In this case, I'd make the stealth check a sniping attempt (-20 to the stealth roll). Because it's a firearm (loud with noticeable smoke), I'd give the perception checks of each enemy +10 to notice the position of the attacker (Sounds of battle mixed with noticing a creature using stealth). Sounds fair to me: your stealth -20 versus their perception +10 to get away with killing a guy with a loud weapon without being noticed.
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I would settle this as a player like so:
Firearm placed against the Target's back or chest, the smoke and gunshot sound going into the target's torso and being muffled. The sound might still be noticeable.
As a GM I would settle it like so:
So you just took out one guy from the ambush. I think the other guys would notice that their friend isn't there anymore. They also heard a slightly muffled bang and their friend screaming into the gloved hand of his killer in absolute pain. You get a -10 to your stealth roll and they get a +5 to their Perception to notice, along with them changing tactics just a little bit.
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Just suck it up and invest in Oils of Silence. Problem solved. You can't use that ability until level 12 anyway and by then a 250 gp investment is chump change.