Tuesday, October 27, 2009

An Overview Of Airsoft Guns

By Anthony Carter

Airsoft guns are replica weapons that are usually highly detailed. They are built for recreational purposes. The games they are involved in entail the opposing players attempting to shoot at each other as one would in a paintball match. Airsoft guns fire pellets, not real bullets, which can travel as fast as 260 mps.

These pellets are usually propelled by some kind of compressed gas or perhaps a spring based piston. An electric piston may also be used. The guns can be fired manually or by an electric motor or by compressed gas, which is usually propane, green gas 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.

Additionally, a plastic or rubber pellet could break the skin when fired at short distances, if a gun is upgraded to fire faster than 150 miles per second. A few sites will state that guns of this kind should not be used to play with, especially when they are upgraded in such a manner. There has also been a lot of concern over these guns being used 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 origins of the airsoft gun go as far back as 1970s Japan. At this time it was illegal in Japan to own an actual firearm, so there was a demand for replicas. Some companies began to produce realistic spring loaded guns for public use. At first they fired a multitude of plastic and rubber projectiles. However, eventually they were standardized to either 6 mm or 8 mm. The spring loaded guns were eventually superceded by gas powered guns.

The pastime came to America in the 1990s. The first wave of Japanese guns on the open market would become known as "classic airsoft". A decade later the next generation of airsoft guns became available. They were designed by the Tokyo Marui company and became known as the automatic electric gun. Japan had just started to go into recession when these products were launched. Japanese manufacturers began to collapse at an alarming rate, leaving only Tokyo Marui as the main manufacturer of airsoft.

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.

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