Robot Assassins from the Future

After seeing a neighbor with a cheap pellet gun at a campout, and finding out it only cost $30, I started to get the itch to relive the glory days of my youth, blowing away plastic army men and soup cans. I wasn’t prepared to stumble across a global tribe of airgun hackers, or airsmiths. This pistol (right) is a Crosman 2240 with a scope, laser sight, flashlight, and bulk c02 attached. These guys take $50 c02 pistols and trick them out until they look like something from Assassins-R-Us.

There are a number of resources for airgunners, including the internationally flavored alt.sport.air-guns. It’s an odd but friendly mixture of varmint -shooters from South Carolina and 10m Olympic pistol shooters from Europe, using $800 pistols made by Swedish co-ops.

I’m not a real gun guy, per se, but I bought a $25 refurbished Crosman 1377c pistol, which can shoot groups of one inch at 10m in my basement. (if only *I* were that accurate). Sometimes I’ll take it to the fields behind my house and shoot from the hip at debris.

They are all hardware hackers of sorts, and regardless of ideology and nationality. know the importance of merging with the machine to make the perfect shot. These guns are relatively quiet, and shooting the pistol in the basement is paradoxically calming, and pretty fun.