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 often launched by some type of compressed gas. A spring powered or electric piston is also common. Airsoft guns can be operated manually or by using an electric motor or by using compressed gas, which is usually Co2.

Airsoft guns are designed for people aged sixteen and over. With proper care they can be perfectly safe, although some safety concerns have arisen because of the airsoft guns. The pellets are almost always non-metallic and usually travel at to low a velocity to actually penetrate the skin. However, although metal pellets are banned on all Airsoft sites, they are still available from specialist stores. Some players even manufacture their own metal pellets.

A plastic or rubber pellet could, in theory, pierce the skin at close range. A gun would have to be upgraded to shoot faster than 150 mps. There are one or two sites that will suggest that guns set up in this way must not be used to play with. There has also been much concern over airsoft guns being used by criminal gangs.

In the late 1990s there was a spate of holdups where the criminals used airsoft guns in place of real ones. These fakes were much easier to obtain than actual weapons, but could be used for a similar purpose. In order to counter this it has now become illegal to import airsoft guns that do not have bright orange tips on their 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 These spring loaded guns were superceded by the gas powered guns in the late 1980s.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 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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