At New Shooter day, there were a couple of gentlemen at the range with matching BDU (or is it ACU? I can’t keep up) pants and UnderArmor wicking shirts. Under their station I spied some high-dollar MOLLE gear and noticed a unit patch I’d not seen before.
Towards the end of our time there, a third gentleman showed up with the same stuff. I also noticed that their ear protection doubled as a communications headset.
Three guys, matching equipment, shooting pistols at 50 yards. And consistently hitting clay pigeons at that distance. Seeing as 5th Group SF is about 40 miles away from this range, I was…intrigued. When we left for the day, I noticed that the trucks they came in had the same logo as their unit patches as window decals.
I also noticed the trucks were from the wrong county if they were associated with 5th group, and that the trucks didn’t have DOD stickers. Add the fact that this was a public range and I’d seen this kind of thing before* at this range, I investigated when I got home.
And I discovered that those gentlemen were airsofters. I was also introduced to the term “MilSim.”
Now, I am of two minds here. My initial response upon finding out these guys are weekend SpecOps LARPers was, quite honestly, ridicule.
These guys came to a public range essentially “in character” and didn’t let anyone in on the joke. One of my new shooters asked them if they were professionals and they responded with “something like that.” When guy #3 started unloading his gear, he took a suppressor off of an AR, swapped out what looked to be a MultiMount Adapter, and put it on a pistol. I asked him about it, because the pistol was super quiet and I assumed it was the Gemtech MultiMount. He showed it to me, explained that it was legal, and told me who made it. It was only later that I found out it was airsoft.
People don’t like being lied to, and I feel like these guys lied to us.
My second, later reaction was Hey, airsoft or not, training is training and these guys were good. They were, after all, hitting clay pigeons at 50 yards with pistols. Real pistols.
And apparently this MilSim thing is a BFD, and this M7 group is a BFD in MilSim. They like, travel the country and win money and stuff.
So, are they really any different than other LARPers?
What about Civil War Re-enactors? Are they odd because they dress up and play around with really old guns?
How about WWII re-enactors? Paintballers?
This MilSim thing seems like it would be fun, and would get trigger time on the cheap. The airsoft guns these guys use probably cost as much as the real thing, but whats the price per round? Plus you get team tactics and force on force training on the cheap? Sounds like something I need to investigate.
I just wish these guys hadn’t acted the way they did at the range.
*Actually, one of these guys may have actually been the guy from that story. Can’t say for sure, but there was a resemblance.
Oh to have the “wizard” airsoft team. It is very fun training if you’re not afraid of a little pain/sting. You learn a little about how you react when you get amped up and caught up in the moment.
While I have absolutely no problems with anyone getting as far into their hobby as they so desire, I do have to wonder about the… “wisdom” is perhaps the right word… of overlapping a hobby that is inherently a fabrication into reality. Yes, these guys are apparently awesome airsofters, and the uniforms are useful on the field for pretty much the same reasons as the military uses them (well, apart from the zip-tie handcuffs… at a loss on those), but wearing those same uniforms out “in public” can cause all manner of unnecessary and unwarranted confusion. Their attire is their call, but I cannot say as though I would do the same.
Speaking of, I need to get my post about airsoft up one of these days…