.50 Caliber Big Bore Airgun

[su_heading size=”30″]Not your normal Airgun [/su_heading]

[su_dropcap style=”light” size=”5″]B[/su_dropcap]ig bore air rifles are something of a new phenomenon in the world of shooting and hunting. It turns out there’s some real potential in many of these rifles. You can use it for fun shooting at targets and possibly for hunting small game.

Watch the folks from Demolition Ranch try out the Sam Yang Dragon Claw. It may look like an over-and-under shotgun slash grenade launcher like, but it’s a .50 caliber air rifle. What’s cool about this rifle is it not only shoots bullets, it fires something you might not expect. Just watch the video and see for yourself.

Talk about a cool airgun! It’s kind of crazy how easy these are to purchase (but the technology for these big bore airguns is evolving so quickly, the ATF may have been a little blindsided by these things). People are already using these air rifles for large game like deer.

It will definitely be interesting to see if laws evolve and change because of these and the similarly controversial “airbow” starting to make waves with hunters. This is the first one I’ve seen that also has the capacity to shoot both arrows and bullets.

I just have to wonder what the cost comparison looks like when you shoot one of these, contrasted with the ammunition costs of a standard rifle.

Still, this thing is pretty unique, this thing is just too cool!

[su_heading size=”30″]Video Trascription [/su_heading]

[Host] Some of the guns that I make videos with, I really, really like. But some of them totally blow.

[laughter] It’s an air gun! [more laughter]

[Intro]

Welcome to DemolitionRanch. When I think of an “Air rifle”, I think of like, a BB gun or a pellet gun, y’know like, something for a little kid to learn how to shoot, maybe go shoot a bird or squirrel or something, and that’s about it. Or maybe like, a[n] airsoft gun, where you go shoot your buddy, and no-one dies.

That is definitely not what this gun is. It’s not a BB gun, it’s not an Airsoft gun, this is… like, a pretty powerful gun. This is actually called a Dragon Claw, made by Sam Yang, which is Korean I’m pretty sure? I got this off Airgundepot.com, and this is what they call a Big Bore Airgun. It shoots a 50 Caliber bullet, which is crazy. These guns are used for small game, they’re also used for like, Whitetail deer. You can actually take down a deer -where legal- with an air rifle. Which is nuts. Because I’ve never thought of an airgun as being that powerful.

I need to fill this thing up, it’ll be the first time I’ve ever done it. It actually has a gauge here, and it came -[aside to the camera: Focus on that! Focus, you can do it! y-there you go!]- it came with a little bit of air in it, you can see, that we are just getting into the yellow, so I think it’s got air. Basically, it holds air in these two bottom tubes, the top one is the barrel where the 50cal bullet shoots out. So, I’m gonna use this big fill tank right here, which I went and got filled, and uh, try to pump this thing up. I don’t know how. Huh, looks like a standard thing. Alright. And I guess I need to look at this gauge as I’m doing this, make sure I don’t put too much in? I don’t know. I can’t do it with one hand. Alright, we are filling. Oh yeah, cool! I don’t know if you guys can see that, but the gauge is up, it went all the way to red. That took like, hardly any air at all.

Now you can see we are in the green, not into the red yet. I guess it’s ready to put a bullet in there, which I think you do right here. Yeah.

So both these bullets are 50 caliber, this one is a hollow-point one-hundred-eighty-grain, this one is obviously not, but it does have a steel tip, it’s two-hundred grain. Let’s do it!

I’m gonna shoot a hollow-point first. No idea how I’m supposed to do this. So this gun is just a single-shot rifle. –doesn’t seem right– Okay.

So now that the air tanks are full and we have a bullet loaded in the chamber, I think you just cock it. And there’s apparently two positions here, one for low-power, one for high. I think that’s the low power. I think I went back halfway.
I’m gonna shoot this thing with no ear protection on, just because I want to see how loud or quiet it is, hopefully that’s not a mistake. We’ve a target at twenty-five yards.

[P-TING]

Woah. That was cool! A little bit too loud for shooting without ear protection on, but not nearly as loud as a gun. Hopefully you guys can tell that, because that ring was super super loud, because that 50-cal bullet hit it.

There’s our hit right there, very cool.

Now that I know the sights are on, I went ahead and moved the target back another fifteen yards, so we’re probably around forty yards now. What’s really cool about this airgun, and all airguns, is that the ATF -the organization that makes all the laws of firearms in the United States- does not actually classify this as a gun. Even though it shoots a projectile capable of taking down a deer, it’s not a firearm. Which means that you do not have to abide by firearms laws. Which means that I can order it online, and they can just ship it to my house. Which means that there’s no short-barreled rifle laws. So you can have as short or as long of a rifle as you want. Which also means that it can be fully automatic, just like an airsoft gun can, it’s just a big airsoft gun, even though it’s not shooting anything soft.

So you can have a fully-automatic gun, that shoots lead, but without gunpowder, and it’s legal. If they made that. Which they should. Someone should make that.

So this time, I’m going with some ear protection, because it wasn’t super loud. It was about like a silenced rifle, which is not crazy loud, but it still doesn’t feel good on your ears. We’re gonna do the 200-grain with the little steel tip, this time.

Speaking of silencers, you can put silencers on these guns. You can make them even quieter than they already are, because they’re not firearms. They’re just air rifles. It’s pretty cool. This time I’m gonna go back all the way. So that first click is for low power [click] now we’re doing high power.

[P-TING!]

It’s noticeably quieter when you have earmuffs on than a regular firearm.

We’re at one-hundred and sixty right now, I’m gonna fire one high-power round out of it, and we’ll see how much it drops, because obviously, it can’t hold pressure forever. So yeah, we’re at one sixty right now, high power.

[P-TING!]

Now… -tsk- like at one-fifty. [Focus, focus, you can do it! This camera’s focus!]
There you go! One-hundred and fifty. So you get quite a few shots. The reason it has red, green, and yellow is because you don’t want to be overpowered and in the red, and you don’t want to be under-powered and in the yellow– it’ll still shoot, but you’re not going to get the same velocity, so it’s going to be dropping way quicker.

I’m gonna see how fast I can shoot five bullets out of this gun. I have four in my hand, one in the chamber, we’re just going for speed, not necessarily accuracy. Let’s see how fast we can do this.

[P-ting!]
That’s a hit. -huff- this is hard. This is like, muzzle-loader. S’not that hard.
[P-ting!]
Another hit. Aagh!
[P-ting!]
‘Nother hit! If I can get five for five, that’d be crazy. But I probably just jinxed myself.
[P-ting!]
-whew- last one, don’t mess this up, matt, like you mess up everything in your life. -whew-
[P-ting!]
-Whew!- Yiss!

Not the fastest, but not too bad, either! And let’s see: after those five –Oh my gosh, this focus is gonna kill me, just focus on it!– It’s almost in the yellow. Just take my word for it, guys, you really need me to prove this? There we go! Almost in the yellow!

So we started just below the top of the green, and now we’re just above the bottom of the green, so you probably get about ten shots in that green range before it starts dropping off.

Found some of the pieces of lead under that metal target. They’re all just totally smushed. As soon as they hit that steel, they just flattened out, and uh, got really really wide.

I’m gonna fill up again, because now I’m gonna shoot at some targets, see how much damage this thing does.

This thing is loaded with air, I’m gonna put a hollow-point in here, and now I’ve got a full water jug over there, and I’m gonna shoot at it on high power. I wanna see two things: I wanna see if I can find the bullet afterwards, to see if it expands that hollow point at all, I would assume it does not, just because I don’t think the velocity’s high enough, but maybe it will. I also just wanna know what happens to the water jug. Does it just poke a hole and go through? Or does it explode it? I don’t think it’s gonna explode it. We’ll know in a second.

[BLAM]

Wow, it was actually a lot better than I thought it was gonna be!

Here is our water jug, do we have a bullet in it? [sloshing] Nope. So… wow, so we came in right there, that is our entry hole, there was so much pressure it popped the top off, which it usually does, it also cracked this right here, there’s a big hole there, and then it came through the back right there, and also busted out the back.

So, looks like we need to put two water jugs in a row, see if we can catch that bullet.

Probably hard to see for you guys, but there are two water jugs there, lined up in a row, so hopefully we can catch them.

[BLAM]

Looks like I hit both!

Alright, let’s see… Maybe that’s actually the entry hole? So maybe on that other one, the big hole was the entry hole, and that was an exit hole. Because I think it was– it was turned this way… and then… dangit, it went through this one too. So it went in the second one, came out the back there. Man, I just wanna find that bullet. But, not looking like it’s gonna happen today.

I did not bring any more water jugs out here with me today, but I did bring a watermellon. And I’m gonna shoot it with one of these steel-tipped slugs. From fairly close-range.

[BLAM]

Heheh. That was cool!

There’s our entry hole, and there’s our exit hole. Pretty cool. When you shoot these watermellons with a pistol, it usually does that. When you shoot ’em with a rifle, it explodes, because rifles have so much more energy. So this air-rifle has kind of the energy of a pistol.

I just filled up the air tank again, I’m gonna walk down to the creek and fire some long-distance. I’m using the creek just because I’ll be able to see kinda how far they go. I watched a video that Iraq Veteran made with -not this gun, and not a 50 caliber- but a similar big-bore airgun, and he shot at like four-hundred forty yards, and it would have gone a lot further too if he- I think if he had the range, so I know these things can go pretty far. We probably have about… hummm, two-hundred yards of straight creek right here, so we’ll be able to see it hit the water quite a distance aways.

We’re here now, and I just saw a snake, it like, crawled right over my foot. And i realize as I’m saying that, I’m going to get lots of Toy Story quotes. So go ahead, get it out of your system. We’re gonna be shooting straight down this creek.

This is the round-nose, safety off.

[BLAM]

Didn’t make it all the way down there, hope you guys can see this. That was probably about… maybe a little over a hundred, maybe a hundred-twenty-five yards. This is the hollow-point. Putting whatever comes out of my pocket in there.

[BLAM]

That was about as far as we’re going to be able to shoot. Hope you guys can see that on this camera. It’s clear as day out here, because it’s splashing that water.

[BLAM]

That was right at the end, there.

[BLAM]

That one definitely hit rock.

[BLAM]

Pretty good splash. This thing really doesn’t recoil very much, either. I’ll shoot it like this so you can see.

[BLAM]

That is a very, very small kick to it. Any kid could shoot this thing, no problem. Not very loud, no recoil at all, just have one hand and a finger on it.

[BLAM]

Easy!

Now I have something super cool that I want to show you, that you can do with this air rifle.

What’s up? Not much, just about to set up my bow and arrow targets. For my bow, of course!

[Holds up Air Bolts box]

No way. It shoots arrows! These arrows are specifically designed to be shot out of this gun! They call ’em air-bolts. For those who don’t know, Combound bows shoot arrows pretty hard. But crossbows shoot them even harder. REALLY hard. Like way harder. This is going to go as fast as a crossbow can shoot. So this thing is as powerful, if not more powerful, than the most powerful crossbow. Yeah let me just show you the back of it here, with a bullet, in comparison, so you can kinda see how it works. That’s the back of the arrow, you can see that it is the same as the back of a bullet. This camera sucks at focusing. So, I assume you just put it in here and twist the fins all one direction?

[Clip of One Direction’s “You don’t know you’re beautiful”]

So there’s the tip of the arrow, sticking out. Go ahead and close this port… I think it should be ready to go. Safety off. I uh, filled this tank up. So we have a fresh tank. -phew- see what we can do here.

[BLAM]

WOAH!
It went straght through that thing and launched out the back!

[Slow-mo instant replay]

Arrows out of my Compound bow will stick in that thing, and they’re skinnier! And they still stick! That thing went straight through because it was going so fast!

There’s my truck, there’s the arrow target I was shooting at, and way over here is our arrow. Tip still good, looks like we lost the part that sits behind the arrow.
I’ll shoot another one and see if these are a one-time firing thing, or if you can shoot them more than once.

I was aiming at the center bulls-eye, you can see I hit right there, you can see that hole’s bigger than the others. And it came out right here, you can notice there’s no other exit wounds, because I’ve never actually had an arrow go all the way through this thing. A lot of power, a lot of speed.

It spins as it goes down with the rifle, I think that’s kinda cool. Okidokie. Safety again.

[BLAM]

That one may have stuck, I didn’t see it fly out.

Cool! Nice kill!

My computer monitor on my main editing computer is out, so… I’m gonna shoot an arrow through it.

[BLAM]
[laughter] That was so cool!

Looks like it may need another arrow!

[BLAM]

There’s something very satisfying about sticking an arrow into one of those oldschool computer monitors.

Nice.

Thanks for being here with me today, and thanks to our friends at Airgun Depot, for showing me that these guns even exist. But I guess they don’t really exist, because
the ATF doesn’t classify them as guns…So they’re kinda like ghost guns! That’s pretty cool! Go get yourself a shirt, at Magpull.com/Demoranch, go get your friend a shirt too and your mom a shirt, and your brother needs a shirt. And if I ever see anyone wearing my shirts, I’ll walk up to you, and I’ll give you a hug, that’s my promise to you. Thanks for watching DemolitionRanch, and I will see you next time!

[Outro Sequence]

Source: Demo Ranch Youtube, AirgunDepot.com