Headshots In Airsoft: Argument For Full Face Protection

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

The quotes are from vari­ous people in the arnies air­soft dis­cus­sion on this issue I have recently become embroiled in a very heated com­munity debate regard­ing head­shots in airsoft.

I am going here present the full force of my argu­ment and sound a call for what I believe is the most import­ant change needed to the sport; the man­dat­ory wear­ing of full face pro­tec­tion. Air­soft is a lot more than simply a tar­get sport. Air­soft is the recre­ation of a con­flict played out as a skir­mish­ing encounter with a set of rules and struc­ture. These encoun­ters are essen­tially split into two dis­tinct game types, which has lead to two dif­fer­ent feel­ings regard­ing the issue under dis­cus­sion. Firstly we have Urban/CQB envir­on­ments. CQB is close, very close and shots to the head are very com­mon indeed. Given the lim­ited space avail­able in CQB envir­on­ments even un-aimed shots have a very good chance of strik­ing the head. Urban is sim­ilar. The main dif­fer­ence between Urban and CQB is that in Urban range is more mixed. For whilst it can be as close as CQB in parts, such as in houses, it can also be almost wood­land ranges in places. How­ever, this does not in any­way reduce the amount of hits to the head as people are often shoot­ing at shapes in win­dows or door­ways and the nat­ural defens­ive pos­i­tion is to hold the body behind cover and only show the smal­lest part of the head and gun.

“Aim should always be centre-mass any­way. But if a head is all I can see, I will aim for it.”

The second type of envir­on­ment is wood­land. In wood­land dis­tance is rarely less than 20ft. Fixed pos­i­tion assaults do bring the play­ers within that dis­tance, but gen­er­ally wood­land play­ers are less likely to be face to face with their oppon­ents. This how­ever, again, does not reduce the num­ber of head­shots because of the increased use of sniper rifles in open play and the tar­get­ing of the head by such players.

“I dont worry about head­shots. Got one on me, take it. I expect the same in return. If its a prob­lem, we won’t play together. To not take a shot on someone when its applic­able is retarded. Oth­er­wise dont call it “milsim”.”

The rule makers in CQB have long known about the prob­lems of close con­tact and there are plenty of meth­ods to reduce the risk of injury to the play­ers. In some sites a hel­met is man­dat­ory (long­moor), in oth­ers all CQB envir­on­ments are single shot (Spectre) and at some the choice is left up to the player who receives all the pos­sible encour­age­ment to wear full face pro­tec­tion (Elec­trow­erkz). In these envir­on­ments play­ers know that head­shots will not only hap­pen, but are actu­ally played for. The head is often the first thing seen of the oppon­ent apart from his fire­arm and ‘select­ive’ tar­get­ing is impossible.

“I per­son­ally think head shots should only be viewed as a last resort option, only to be taken very rarely for one simple reas­son. Air­soft is sup­posed to be, above and before any­thing else, fun. I you end up acci­dent­ally injur­ing someone by tak­ing a head shot, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be hav­ing too much fun after­wards. Like­wise, in my case at least, it’s highly unlikely I’d be hav­ing too much fun afterwards.”

The rule-makers in wood­land rarely come into con­tact with such con­di­tions, but still efforts are made to reduce injur­ies. Many sites require snipers to have a min­imum engage dis­tance and the dir­ect tar­get­ing of the head is frowned upon as unsport­ing. Some require that guns are switched to semi in cer­tain games or scen­arios, or that people should ‘bang dead’ an oppon­ent who is very close without fir­ing. It is against this back­ground that the argu­ments arise. The fol­low­ing are my thoughts on the sub­ject of headshots.

Why aim for the head?

“Ah, I’m not going to vote. I shoot at whatever I can see. If the head is the only part that I can see than I’ll shoot at it because that means one less per­son on the other team. If the torso and head is all I can see then I’ll aim in the gen­eral dir­ec­tion and hit some­thing. I don’t really care which…”

Head­shots are an import­ant part of the game of air­soft. Air­soft is an attempt to make a ‘safe’ ver­sion of a real battle, where people can come and play out com­bat scen­arios without being killed or injured. All aspects of com­bat are played out with weapons of all types and pyro’s tak­ing the place of explos­ives and gren­ades. As such, in a real battle the fight­ers would of course aim for whatever comes into range first. Unsur­pris­ingly this would include the head as a primary tar­get as a shot to the head is usu­ally fatal. I have yet to come across an air­soft site that has banned head­shots all together. In fact I have only seen such a rule set in a paint­ball match and frankly I felt it made a mock­ery of the game. All rules in a true sport are pushed and con­sidered for advant­age. In the paint­ball game I men­tioned; play­ers showed only their heads and their guns in the open, safe in the know­ledge that they were immor­tal this way. It made for quite a strange sight I can tell you!

“Since I play CQB and full face mask is required. I’m kind of appre­ci­at­ive if they go for the head­shot as it doesn’t hurt a bit. But I under­stand where if people are not using full face mask then that would be dan­ger­ous. But since they have the option to wear full face mask. It’s their own fault for choos­ing not to. Maybe they like get­ting hit in the face.”

It is this aspect of ‘sports­man­ship’ that also leads to tar­get­ing of the head in air­soft. Often in our sport people do not ‘take their hits’. This is con­sidered the worst pos­sible offence and rightly so. Some sites run a total ‘no second chances’ rule on this. We can all agree that there are many reas­ons why someone might not take a hit to the body, from the testoster­one ruled rage redu­cing the pain of the hit, to the BB strik­ing soft webbing and not mak­ing any noise nor being able to be felt, to plain out­right cheat­ing. The gen­eral opin­ion of such play is split into two camps. The first advoc­ates ‘lacing the bas­tard’, which as I will claim later increases injur­ies and cre­ates a big­ger prob­lem. The other opin­ion advoc­ates shoot­ing them in the head. Why? Because: almost every­one ‘takes the hit’ from a head­shot. Even if the per­son can­not feel it, they will cer­tainly hear it. Only the very worst of offend­ers will not walk after such treat­ment and at my club these people are found and banned (Mar­cus, I am look­ing at you).

Isn’t shoot­ing to the head unsporting?

“If it’s an issue for you to get shot in the face, wear a mask. End, full stop.”

As I men­tioned, in CQB you have little choice regard­ing where on the oppon­ent you place your shot. A vast amount of the game is played at a very fast pace and in an envir­on­ment of large amounts of full con­tact fire. In such pres­sur­ised play­ing fields it is impossible to not aim at whatever tar­get the oppon­ent places in view. A player tends to find a style of play that works for them and sticks to it. The greater prob­lem is this: air­soft hurts a lot. In CQB lacings are com­mon and great pain can be both given and received by the play­ers. This has led to the increased use of armour. I myself have a full level 3 armour set that totally pro­tects my body from the rig­ors of ‘hard­core’ CQB. As my air­soft play­ing got bet­ter I slowly removed parts and now wear only a light jacket, gloves, cup, mask and hel­met. How­ever, the gen­eral trend is in the other direction.

People are now wear­ing such amounts of armour and com­bat vests that hits to the body are not felt at all. In fact, such play­ers need a full lacing before they will even walk. Is this a prob­lem with cheat­ing? No, it is a nat­ural reac­tion to the essen­tial pain of air­soft and the fact that we all have work to go to/women to sleep with and both bosses and babes hate huge welts over your body.

I played once, one time only, before I got a hel­met. I played with full face from the start. Pain is not my friend and my wife hates the injur­ies I was return­ing home with.

“Too right it’s unsport­ing! As XXXX says, most of us don’t play for the pain and don’t play to cause oth­ers pain — to delib­er­ately hurt someone is sick and any­one with that atti­tude should be be banned from sites.”

What this trend has led to in CQB is a dir­ect tar­get­ing of the head of the oppon­ent. Espe­cially when using pis­tols or single shot. If one does not shoot them in the head there is a fair pos­sib­il­ity that they wont take the hit at all and noth­ing is more aggrav­at­ing that win­ning a battle but being laced by the oppon­ent after they are dead “because they didn’t feel it mate” etc. This has become a vicious circle and one which the mar­shalling team at my site do everything in their power to pre­vent. With a firm limit on FPS, play­ers will use whatever advant­age they can gain. This is not unsport­ing. This is the key to a sport. Take fen­cing. A hun­dred years ago one was not sup­posed to block fen­cing attacks and cer­tainly not counter attack. This was con­sidered un-gentlemanly. Com­pared to the sport today, such anti­quated notions are com­ical. Moreover, and even more rel­ev­ant fen­cers never wore masks. It took many many deaths before fen­cing became a proper sport and took the safety of its play­ers ser­i­ously. The last death in fen­cing was in the 80’s and unsur­pris­ingly masks are essen­tial. This is because as the art evolved into the sport people became com­pet­it­ive. Once this hap­pens, safety can no longer be a mat­ter of choice; it must be mandated.

My argu­ment is essen­tially this: If air­soft is going to sur­vive as a sport and even become fully recog­nised, we must be safe and this must be in the rules.

Why not just ban headshots?

“I always head­shot when assault­ing. End of.”

BB’s rain down in all dir­ec­tions dur­ing play. On both wood­land and CQB, sup­port weapons and very fast fir­ing guns are com­mon­place. Wood­land play­ers often fire burst way in excess of CQB play­ers and some CQB play­ers have guns that fire over 42 BB’s a second! In such play, can we really not expect some BB’s to hit the oppon­ents head? No. Some anec­dotal evid­ence: In one game I was play­ing I saw a very nasty acci­dent. A guy wear­ing only shoot­ing glasses (pro­fes­sional ones held on with an elastic band mind) took a burst from 20ft away. Now the burst was aimed in his gen­eral dir­ec­tion as he had stepped out into fire and not spe­cific­ally aimed at his head and indeed most of it missed him. But from my vant­age point of next to him in cover I saw the BB’s that missed pass behind him and bounce off the wall. One in par­tic­u­lar then passed back over his shoulder, very close to his ear, and entered the lens of the glasses at the rear. It then bounced back off the lens into his eye. The effect was devastating.

So why not make goggles the man­dat­ory standard?

“If a head is all you can see then you are aim­ing to elim­in­ate the oppos­i­tion from the game before they elim­in­ate you. You are either doing this because that is your object­ive or they are pre­vent­ing you from com­plete­ing your object­ive. I do not play this game to cause pain but if a head is all I can see then that is what I am going to fire at. Don’t like it? Get a full face mask. I did.”

Far more com­mon than the ser­i­ous danger of eye injury is teeth dam­age. Both in wood­land from sniper fire or lacings and in CQB. One chap, who I had warned about this simply smiled at me and pulled up his scarf to cover his mouth. “I won’t open my mouth,” he said. In the very first game he came around a corner to come face to face with me. We both instinct­ively tar­geted each other, but I was faster and shot him in the chin with a single BB from my pis­tol. The red welt was clear and I again said that he should bor­row a full face mask. Again he simply smiled, thanked me for shoot­ing him only the once and went to regen’. At the end of the night he was still smil­ing, but with one less tooth. He had run scream­ing into a full auto bar­rage of fire and had had the bot­tom of his front tooth shot clean out. A very clear circle of white was miss­ing from his mouth. I shook my head at him and told him where the nearest cash­point was. He smiled again and left the venue.

Full face would have saved him that injury. Noth­ing else, not ‘avoid­ing shoot­ing the face’ or ‘ban­ning head­shots’ or even ‘pen­al­ising the player who shot him’ would have had any effect on the dam­age. And con­sider this, I had dir­ectly (albeit instinct­ively) tar­geted his head whereas the lacing that took his tooth had not. I con­tend that it is not the tar­get­ing of the head, but the lacing that causes the most injuries.

The argu­ments against full face, are they not convincing?

The argu­ments I have read and heard in my time against full face pro­tec­tion range from the piti­ful to the stupid:

1. “I can’t see down my sights”. This is very easy to fix, by the simple pur­chase of a riser.
2. “It doesn’t fit my load out.” Wan­na­bies and gear­dos are the scourge of this sport. I have even seen people with goggles on their hel­mets, but only shoot­ing glasses on their face! This is just ask­ing for injury.
3. “I wear a scarf.” Scarf’s don’t stop anything.
4. “I will close my mouth.” This is per­haps the stu­pid­est argu­ment. When shot most people let out a man­dat­ory noise, it is the word “hit!” In 99% of sites you have to say this sound. Try shout­ing hit with your mouth closed. You can’t, this so called argu­ment is stupid.
5. “I am over 18 and can do what I like.” Well, I am over 30 and I can’t. I can’t leave my fen­cing mask at home, I can’t spar at Kar­ate without a floor mat and I shouldn’t be able to sign away my safety at airsoft.
6. “I play wood­land, we don’t need full face.” I play all types of air­soft and I have taken head shots in wood­land that have scared the crap out of me. Only two weeks ago I must have been hit with an 8mm gas rifle (we sus­pect the M1 Garand) because I clonked me in the face from what seemed like MILES away. Wood­land play is often not crono’ed, and as far as I am con­cerned an injury from a ‘wood­land’ AEG can be much worse than a CQB one.

So what are you suggesting?

I say that all air­soft play­ers should be forced to wear either full face pro­tec­tion in the form of a paint­ball or mesh mask, or in the form of a goggles/neoprene com­bin­a­tion. It is only when we take safety ser­i­ously and man­date pro­tec­tion for our play­ers that this fledgling sport has a chance of main­stream suc­cess and national recog­ni­tion. Images of people without teeth, bleed­ing gums and shot out ears hurts our sport and we must do some­thing about it.

Regards,

Basho

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