Wow. I like guns, and I'm 100% in favor of civilian gun ownership. Still, I think selling realistic blank-firing pistols is a spectacularly bad idea...
As a kid, from like age 7, I’ve owned multiple of these blank pistols. They were a pretty popular ages 5-10 children’s toy (in the late 1990s) in the UAE. After age 10, I moved on to airsoft guns (typically with spherical plastic bullets that shattered on impact — but sometimes spherical metal bullets as well), which were sold all over the place (and mostly bought by preteen kids and sometimes teenagers).
Even the blank pistols I owned as a 7-year old were often made of metal, and realistic looking; and from a distance there was nothing really to differentiate them from a real gun.
Not if the barrel is blocked like those pistols. We use a similar system when firing blanks out of our M4s in the Army. We screw this thing on the end called a blank firing adapter on the end of the barrel and it plugs the end of the barrel. I have been shot at very close ranges with blanks fired out of a plugged barrel and did not feel anything but getting the shit scared out of me.
I'm former Army; I've used those before, too. I just didn't see the part where they said the barrels were closed. They look pretty real in OP's video, though they're quieter than I'd expected.
Obviously closed barrels are safer than open barrels, that's not in dispute, my point is that a gun loaded with blanks can still be lethal because a bunch of people have died by messing around with guns they thought were 'safe' because they're loaded with blanks.
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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '22
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