The History Of Airsoft Guns

By Anthony Carter

Airsoft guns are replica firearms that are highly detailed and manufactured mainly for recreation. Games are planned where players try to shoot one another in a similar way to paintball tournaments. The guns fire pellets, as opposed to real bullets, that travel at speeds of up to 260 miles per second.

The pellets are propelled by compressed gas or a spring loaded piston, or sometimes even an electric piston. They are usually made out of rubber or plastic. The gun can be fire manually or else by an electric motor or compressed gas, usually green gas, propane or Co2.

People under the age of sixteen should not use airsoft guns. When they are operated carefully they are completely safe. However, some have muttered concerns about the use of these guns. The pellets they use are normally non-metallic and are traveling at a slow speed. This means that they cannot pierce the flesh. Pellets made of metal are not advertised on any Airsoft site, but they can still be purchased from specialists. It is also possible for someone to manufacture their own metal pellets.

In addition, a non-metallic pellet could penetrate the skin at short distances, when a gun is upgraded to higher than 150 miles per second. Some sites will specify that these kinds of guns should not be used to play with when they have been upgraded in this way. There was also a concern of these guns being used in place of actual weapons during criminal activities.

There was a spate of holdups during the late 1990s where the perpetrators used airsoft guns. These were obviously much easier to obtain than real weapons, but could serve a similar purpose. To counter this it is now illegal to import an airsoft gun that does not have a bright orange tip on the barrel.

The airsoft gun originates in 1970s Japan. During this time it was illegal to own a real firearm, and consequently there was a big demand for replica weapons. A few companies began manufacturing realistic guns that were spring loaded. In the beginning they fired a wide variety of both plastic and rubber bullets. However, they were eventually standardized to 6 mm and 8 mm caliber. These spring loaded guns were superceded by the gas powered guns in the late 1980s.

The hobby became popular in America in the mid 1990s. The early Japanese guns would become known as classic airsoft. Ten years later a new generation of guns arrived, the automatic electric guns designed by Tokyo Marui Co. Ltd. The release of these guns coincided with a recession in Japan. Many Japanese manufacturers folded and eventually the only main producer was the inventor of the automatic electric gun.

Marui then worked to improve the accuracy and range of these guns. It developed an advanced Hop up system, which forms the basis of the modern gun. At the beginning of the 2000s a new company came to challenge Marui's dominance. Classic Army of Hong Kong began to introduce more and more accurate guns to the market. Since then dozens of Chinese brands have flooded the market with more basic entry level guns. - 31409

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