Avoid the Tat (Rifles)

Member Name: dirtyhabbit

Product:	Rifles
Date:	25/08/05 (474 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good Fun, Easy to get hold of.

Disadvantages: May be banned soon.

I've been into Airsoft for a couple of years now. I am a skirmisher with probably near £1k worth of Airsoft Guns and then about £500 of accessories. On top of that I work in a shop which sells the guns and accessories, so I'm in the know about the latest gossip. I'll give you news about that at the end of this review.

Getting back to rifles, when you decide you want an Airsoft rifle, the first thing you have to make sure is that you have somewhere to use it. Your home is legal, private land is legal. On the streets and in car parks and public forrests is illegal.

The second thing to do is give youself a budget. If your budget was arround £100 I'd say to get a Spring powered Rifle as you would not get a good quality or even a poor quality electric rifle for that price. It would be terrible, it would probably run on AA batteries that would drain in seconds, and be about as powerful as a mouse with crippling arthiritis. However for £100 you would get a very well made spring rifle, for example you can get an official Colt M4 spring rifle that retails at £80.

I would not recomend buying an electric rifle unless you were willing to spend at least £150 - £200 including a good quality Ni-Cd battery and fast charger.

A good starting Automatic Electric Gun (AEG) would me the MP5k, which retails at £120. Made by marui so you know its reliable, it comes out of the box with a good rate of fire and a fairly powerfull 220fps.

You can spend any amounts of money, you can even buy M60's for prices starting at around £500.

Brand wise, Tokyo Marui make some good afforible guns, however they are mostly plastic, and come with basic internals, and never come at the full 320fps legal skirmishing power, however they have the largest selection of AEG's so if there is a specific rifle you are after the Marui might be the only one.

There are many brands all very similar, but the one I would recomend are ICS. They don't have the biggest range, but do a lot of Colt's and H&K's. They do a range of full metal M4's, M16's, MP5's etc which come with the full internal upgrades too and at nearly 320fps the only thing you will want to do to them is cosmetic. Considering all of this, they are only a tiny bit more expensive than a stock Marui rifle, so to get a Marui rifle to this kind of quality would cost you around £300 extra.

Thats pretty much the lowdown on AEG's. Have a good look around at what rifle you want before you purchase one, but before I finish I have some info for you.

The VCR Bill: On the 8th June 2005 the government unveiled their Violent Crime Reduction Bill (VCR Bill) which if passed in its current form will prohibit by law the trade/sale/import and manufacture of anything that looks like a firearm in the UK. The sport and hobby that we all enjoy now lies in severe jeopardy.

The current proposal represents a bill that has had multiple topics thrown into it so as to bundle it through the Commons on the back of the popular topics that no one would dare contest.

Our premise is simple, tighter controls on Firearms are pointless, years of amendments to the Acts have left us with some of the tightest laws in the world in relation to guns of any form and gun related crime is still out of control according to the statistics that are peddled to push this bill through.

The bill fully demonstrates how the majority of this country's population have been made irrationally scared of anything gun shaped, with the popular media and the vast majority of politicians to blame for the current state of affairs. We now stand poised to ban anything and everything that looks like a gun in one final amendment to protect the population from their own phobias.

Now they are still going to let you use them, so I suggest if you want one, buy it now!

Summary: Catch them while you can!