Armed Lifestyle - Issue 2 - June 2022

58
6MM TRAINING
be able to tell at first glance that these were not real
firearms. Of course when I bring things up to date with my
gaming and training armoury these are replicas of exactly
what folk see in movies and on the news every day (sadly
at the moment) and I’m certain that in a non-permissive
environment many find these downright scary.
So that’s really the first part of “training”; I need to
keep my replicas safely and securely just as I would a real
firearm; although they are “non-lethal” they still LOOK like
they are, so I, and we, need to be very aware of that fact!
GETTING YOUR GAME ON!
With that bit firmly out of the way I’d like to open the door
a little on possibilities for you to train with, and enjoy a
6mm Realistic Imitation Firearm (or RIF as they are referred
to legally). You might think that an “airsoft” or “soft air”
platform (and here I include both pistols and rifles, etc)
is for the kids to run around with in the woods or at an
airsoft site, and you wouldn’t be wrong, and personally I’d
rather have a kid of mine running around outdoors than
sat behind a console playing “call-of-modern-battlefieldwarfare-duty”!
I will come back to this side of things later,
but first I’d like to draw your attention to another side of
“airsoft”, and that’s the competition side of things!
Many owners of real firearms, through no fault of
their own, don’t know that there is a very healthy, and
global airsoft “Practical Pistol” community, and that
“Action Air” is actually recognised in its own right to the
very highest level by the International Practical Shooting
Confederation (IPSC), and international shooting events
under its auspices are going on all the time! The following
is taken from a report written about the first Shooting
Centre Shooting Cup in Taiwan by my good friend Stu
Mortimer who has kindly allowed me to share it, (along
with some of his images), and I believe it gives some
indication of just how difficult “6mm” IPSC-style events
are, and just how much they share with the “real steel”
side of things!
“Stage 1 involved ‘walking the plank’ during any
movement; with an inverted Y arrangement of quadruple
laterally stacked wooden batons tie-wrapped together
in composite planks end to end, and shooting had to be
done from a stationary position anywhere along these,
with procedural errors and penalties for every instance of
the shooter’s feet touching the floor… this took me back
to the old ‘shark infested custard’ command tasks of my
cadet days, but with shooting and balance alongside a
time constraint thrown in.
I started off fairly well, straddling the neck of the
inverted Y and taking out the paper and twin poppers on
the left quite slickly, then moving right with my fire taking
out the central popper in the rear bay at the foot of the
Y, and on to twin papers in the centre right, then having
to crab shuffle my huge canoe feet carefully along the
planks to get the twin poppers and single papers visible
from the far right position, before cheesing it back the
way I came and damn near falling into the rear bay to
engage the rear right hand paper, and sweeping left to
the final no-shoot obstructed paper and ending plate next to it.”
Now is it just me, or does that sound like a shooting
competition that you might find down at your local range
or club, one that just happens to be shot with “6mm”
rather than “9mm”? It sure does to me, and illustrates
that whilst “airsoft” can be looked down on, it can also
be looked up to as a fine example of shooting sport in the
very best way!
6MM “TRAINING”
So, “6mm Training” is “a thing” right enough, but I’m
still finding that some shooters are denying that this is
another useful tool in the box, and I genuinely have to
question why? Anything, and by that I do mean ANY
SINGLE THING, that makes us more competent, and above
all safer, shooters MUST be a good thing surely?