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Paintball was once considered an extreme sport and the domain of the young and disorganized. Just as sushi was once considered an exotic food and is now considered a staple of the American diet, so too has paintball become mainstreamed in the sports realm.

Paintball has achieved acceptance within the corporate world as a team-building exercise, and professional, inter-city paintball leagues now have moved the sport past the casual, youth-oriented activity that it once was.

For the casual shoot-em-up enthusiast, however, airsoft gunnery has zipped past paintball on the cool-o-meter.

For certain, airsoft is now a valuable training tool for law enforcement personnel, where the realism offered by airsoft weapons that look and feel like the real thing provide police and tactical teams with a cost-efficient and safe solution to training scenarios.

Despite the fact that these two shooting sports may seem to attract a similar demographic, there is relatively little crossover between the two.

According to a survey in Popular Airsoft magazine, only seven percent of respondents play both paintball and airsoft; a majority of airsoft combatants (57 percent) claimed that they have never played paintball.

HARD CORE AIRSOFT

But what happened to the paintball craze?

“Paintball requires more players, more organization and more planning that airsoft. Airsoft is a more casual sport. A handful of airsoft players can get together in a backyard and quickly set up a skirmish,” according to David Buman of Palco Sports (Maple Grove, Minnesota), a prominent supplier of airsoft equipment and accessories. “Unlike paintball, you don’t need a large playing field, you don’t have to worry about paint damage and you don’t need to stock up on CO2 cartridges,” Buman added.

The growing realism (in weight, appearance and scale) of airsoft guns and the ever-improving reliability and quality of airsoft guns has also helped promote the sport.

For example, Palco has recently added a few ultra-realistic guns that are bb-spittin’ images of famous submachine guns like the Kalashnikov AK-47 and the WWII-era Thompson. Both of these electric-powered models retail for $250.00 yet the company has already sold out its entire first run of each of them.

There are three types of airsoft guns - the basic spring-loaded model; the gas-powered pistol; and the automatic electric (battery-operated) gun (AEG). The AEG offers the advantage of automatic repeat fire, while the spring-loader is strictly a single-shot at a time gun.

According to Buman, the latter accounts for about 50 percent of sales. And while the cost of AEGs have come down, the entry-level spring-loaded gun still commands almost half of all unit sales.