by B.B. Pelletier
Announcement: Before we begin, I want to mention a correction I’ve made to the review of the Evanix Conquest. Apparently, the dual mag is not included with the gun. It was simply sent with the gun for testing. I’ve edited the review and noted the edits. The dual mags are available for purchase.
The Mayhem .45 Sport Tactical air pistol is a big, heavy airgun.
Today, we’ll look at the power and velocity of the Mayhem .45 Sport Tactical air pistol. As you recall, this pistol is double-action only (DAO), which means the trigger retracts the striker before firing. So, the trigger-pull will never change as you shoot. It’s always going to be heavier than a single-action trigger.
Don’t confuse single-action and double-action with single-stage and two-stage. They describe entirely different things. Single-stage triggers are those that have no movement when the gun is cocked. You just pull until the gun fires. Two-stage triggers have a lighter first stage that stops at stage two, which then should break or release crisply when the gun fires.
The test
I always learn something from every test I conduct, and this time was no different. For the first time in my experience, I found a CO2-powered BB gun that needs a short break-in! I tested the gun with Daisy zinc-plated BBs. The initial shot went just 351 f.p.s., and I was stunned to see that it was 80 f.p.s. below the advertised velocity. But the next shot went 404 f.p.s., then the third went 373 and so on throughout the first 10 shots.
I saw a high of 429 f.p.s. around shot 10, but the average was far below that number. I reloaded the stick magazine and tried again!
The second time was similar to the first. Shot one went 399 f.p.s., and then the velocity dipped as low as 384 f.p.s. Shot six then went 423 f.p.s., which was the fastest shot in the second 10-shot string that averaged 407 f.p.s.
Then, the gun started performing better and better. The average of the third string was 427. String 4 averaged 421 and on and on until the 11th string averaged 408 f.p.s. That was the final string that made over 400, but there were still about 20 more usable shots left.
Yes, this pistol gave me over 130 shots on a CO2 cartridge! It was as close as I have come to cold fusion in quite a while. I almost had to break the velocity test into two parts because the testing was taking so long. Is that music to your ears? This is the ideal air pistol for those who lament the cost of buying CO2 cartridges.
The fastest recorded shot went 435 f.p.s., so the gun seems to be right on spec. I even got used to the DAO trigger and believe I can control it during the accuracy test.
The gun doesn’t seem to need much recovery time between shots to maintain its velocity. At times I was firing as fast as a shot every 5 seconds without hurting the velocity at all.
Yes, this pistol gave me over 130 shots on a CO2 cartridge! It was as close as I have come to cold fusion in quite a while. I almost had to break the velocity test into two parts because the testing was taking so long.
Magazine
I said in Part 1 that the magazine looked to be easier to load than most stick mags — now I can say that with confidence. The follower locks down in place positively, yet a flick of the finger releases it after the magazine is loaded.
Safety
The safety on this pistol is located on the right side of the frame and is one that requires a forward push on the milled plate to unlock the safety lever, which then moves up and down. It’s a design that requires some thought to operate, but it completely disconnects the trigger from the striker, rendering the gun incapable of firing.
The safety takes a bit of getting used to, but it works fine.
Made for a silencer
The Mayhem has deep roots in the world of airsoft. One of the ways you can tell is by examining the muzzle, which is threaded for a fake silencer. While it wouldn’t change the minimal report (the gun really isn’t very loud), it will probably appeal to many shooters. I don’t know that there’s an optional silencer for this handgun — yet; but if there’s enough demand, one probably could become available in the future.
The muzzle is threaded for a fake silencer.
This is the ideal air pistol for those who lament the cost of buying CO2 cartridges.
So far
All things considered to this point, the Mayhem has a lot going for it — especially the gas economy! But at the price, it’s going to come down to accuracy.
B.B.,
I used to think that 60 shots was a really good number to get from a single cartridge. How can this gun and others (another recent test pistol got 120 shots per cart) get double the number of shots while still giving the same velocity? Is their gas system design just that much better?
Paul
Good question, Paul.
My Daisy 15XT gets about 45 strong shots off one cartridge. 60 if I’m willing to accept some power loss.
Les
Paul,
I’m just as surprised as you. I guess the gas system must be better.
B.B.
Well,…this is an interesting article:
http://news.yahoo.com/texas-police-kill-8th-grader-carrying-pellet-gun-003818851.html
Prepare for calls to change the appearance of pellet/air guns.
I don’t get why people do not obey when a cop orders them to drop the gun??? Unless they WANTED to get shot of course.
J-F
This pistol looks like Robocop pistol.
I must admit 130 shot is quite a feat but I still don’t like it’s look.
J-F
This type of scenario – police order bad guy to drop their weapon and when the bad guy doesn’t or moves the weapon towards the police in a threatening manner, he is shot multiple times – sometimes more than two bullets out of 40 hit him (I’m being sarcastic here) seems fairly common. However, I wonder if (a) the guy freezes out of fear (b) he wants to commit suicide by cop (c) what actually is said and happens are two different things – such as “drop the (bang bang bang) gun”.
On the news the other night, the newscasters showed a pic of the CO2 powered BB gun and I immediately recognized it as such even as the talking head said this was a picture of the firearm the perp had per the police. It was later in the broadcast that they retracted and said it was a BB gun.
One wonders what the heck was going through the mind of the kid? Perhaps (a) above? You don’t suppose others will have a lightbulb go off from this and realize there’s no future in facing someone who’s armed with a real firearm when all they are holding is a pellet or BB gun, do you?
Fred PRoNJ
Fred,
This is exactly the type of scenario that caused California state legislators to go into a tailspin last year and suggest bad legislation regarding airsoft guns and BB guns.
Edith
Why not just drop the gun? Lots of reasons, but the most probable one is plain panic, erasing all abilities on the part of the guy with the pistol to act rationally. Next most likely is that the officer(s)’s report doesn’t square with what actually happened, but the cops unite. Least likely, particularly with a kid, is that he wants to commit suicide by cop.
I’m not arguing for red colored guns or transparent ones, but don’t you think that the industry bears some responsibility when it builds BB guns and/or pellet guns that are so realistic that even our own B.B. comments that it’s hard to tell firearm from CO2 gun? There is little real need to be that accurate. Changes in size, or the addition of “fins” or something that says “not a firearm” would help reduce the levels of tension in the cops’ minds — and let’s not kid ourselves, cops are about as prone to being stressed out and not reacting according to plan when they think they are in mortal danger as any of the rest of us.
Maybe police officers need some dedicated training in telling the difference between a BB gun and a firearm. Something that bothers me in this incident is that one of the entry wounds was in the back of the head.
–pz
Pete, that doesn’t add up. Why a) bring it to school, b) pull it and start waving it around?
And as it’s easy to make a pellet gun look real, it’s just as easy to make a real gun look fake. A lot of bad guys would LOVE to do that – tart up a real gun, and you’ll be sure to get the drop on the cops who will be too scared to fire first. It puts the police into the situation where they can’t defend themselves until they are actually fired upon.
No way.
I rarely disagree with Victor, but this time I do. Strongly.
It’s right after the holidays, and the kid had a new toy he wanted to show off. Did he pull it and “start waving around”? Neither of us know what he was doing with it; I don’t think they’ve released CCTV if they have tape.
Agreed, he’s probably a punk, but that is not a capital offense in the USA.
Now, could you trick up a real gun to look fake? Sure. Not so easily, because the bad guys would actually have to go buy one, not just dig out a “clean” gun from some illegal source. Making BB guns look fake is still an important thing to do.
Cops take risks, and know it. They are hired to protect the public. And often that means they have to take additional risks. Given police firepower, and given the body armor they wear routinely, I do not believe they should fire first in situations like this.
If I were forced to choose, I would choose a London-style unarmed force with specially deployable armed response units who have very good training in self control.
Listening to the tape from the current case sickened me. The calmness with which the dispatcher said “take him out” about an eighth grade kid was nauseating. A lot of hostage negotiation effort should have gone into the situation before opening fire.
pete
pete,
Negotiating with children is tricky business. They don’t think the same way adults think (and, sometimes, they don’t think at all).
I don’t have children, but I’m guessing there are plenty of parents on this blog who have tried negotiating and speaking rationally with their own 8th graders & have found it mind boggling and filled with unpredictability.
Those who knew the boy said he was a bully. While that might mean he pushed other people around & stole their lunch money or their sneakers, it could also mean that he beat the tar out of others & was violent in other ways.
The police officers had precious little info to go on when they came to this situation.
How long would should they have negotiated? Til the first student was shot? The first cop was shot?
When dealing with a bully…and a child, at that…the situation is fraught with so much unpredictability that these cops had to act before the bully killed someone else’s kid. If it’s a toss-up between taking a chance he’ll kill an innocent child who made the mistake of going to school that day or taking out the one who held the gun, I vote for the latter.
The coolness of the person who said to take him out is a matter of training. Do we really want an emotionally distraught person in charge who yells “Take him out! Take him out!” Or would you prefer someone who has weighed all the possibilities and has come to the rational conclusion that taking out one young boy is the lesser of all evils and pronounces it with the cool, collected calmness of a thinking, rational adult who recognizes all the issues and determines that the death of one young boy with a gun (let’s not forget that!) is better than risking the deaths of countless others?
Good decisions that present the least risk to innocent bystanders who made the mistake of getting out of bed and living ordinary lives that day…that’s what I want from those who promise to protect & serve.
Edith
A number of the news reports said that the kid assaulted (bullied?) at least one other child with the gun before the school called the police.
Definitely not a case of him bringing his new Christmas present to school to show off!
We had a similar instance blocks away from where I live this past summer, where a woman was threatening her neighbours with a gun. The cops arrived, she advanced towards them in a threatening manner with the gun and she as killed.
Turned out to be an airsoft.
One bozo on our city council actually suggested afterwords that the police shouldn’t be allowed to discharge their weapon until the ‘bad’ guy fired first, proving whether it was real or not.
Good god!!!
CSD,
Why in the world should we wait for a tragedy to happen before we do something? Do we let planes fall out of the sky and then mandate equipment inspections or should we do it before they fall & kill plane loads of people?
The movie about Sgt. York is wonderful. He didn’t want to kill Germans. He wanted to stop them from killing others…so he took out only as many as was absolutely necessary to prevent more deaths.
Harry “the buck stops here” Truman dropped a couple big bombs on Japan to stop the war and prevent more deaths of American soldiers.
Sometimes, you have to carry a big stick and beat the crap out of the other people who have smaller sticks. They often don’t know that bigger sticks exist…and we know how to use them.
People who do bad things have to be stopped. The 8th grader with a gun was doing something bad, evil and forbidden. He had to be stopped. The news media will play Monday morning quarterback for days or weeks to come. But you can be sure that if it was their kid who had a gun pointed at their head, they’d be begging the police to pull the trigger.
Edith
Making ANY real gun look fake is as easy as taping cardboard to it or buying a can of yellow or red or gold or pink spray paint.
And what exactly do you mean “in situations like this”? You just said you don’t know what the situation was since they didn’t release any tapes. Was he aiming at the police? Was he aiming it at another student or teacher? Could the cop fire first in THAT situation? Does body armor protect a cop 100%? 50%? 25%?
Suppose you mandate that the cop can’t fire first, and the criminal gets lucky and plugs him between the eyes?
It’s easy to get all emotional about a case like this. But that’s about the worst thing to do.
I don’t know if the kid was punk. I don’t know if the kid realized how much trouble he could be in. Doesn’t matter one bit. It was a horrible thing, but people being what they are – horrible things cannot always be prevented. Trying to impose dangerous rules of engagement with a potential shooter is not the answer.
Vince,
You haven’t seen the video either, I presume. Why do you argue that the kid was flashing the gun around?
Why should there be realistic air guns? The only case made was that if they weren’t realistic, there wouldn’t be a market for them. That’s not much justification. Not every market needs to be served, nor is every market served legally.
WHAT about that entry wound in the back of the head? That could be telling you something.
In fact, Edith, we do let planes fall out of the sky or at least get in serious trouble. That’s generally how a fault in an older aircraft is discovered. I know of no other way.
I’ve negotiated with lots of eighth graders, including my own. Granted it takes special training and talent, but it can be done, even in a desperate situation. If the cops had brought a specialist with them, they might have spared a tragedy; I don’t know why they blundered in. It’s not as if they thought they were going to a factory or something; they new they were going to a school with eighth graders. Perhaps every squad needs to have at least one half-way competent negotiator, just to save time.
I firmly believe that American police forces are too imbued with a paramilitary spirit, and that they are too quick to sweep in with vastly over-equipped forces and are frequently too quick to shoot at the slightest provocation. In this case, we have no objective information to say that the kid actually pointed his bb gun at the cops.
I did notice above the caveat in many posts that ran roughly “if the stories are true.”
Edith:
I repeat a question: does the PA 30-day return apply to accessories such as the new trigger for the Izzy?
–pete
pete,
I guess I didn’t see your first request on the Izzy trigger. Yes, the 30-day return period applies to it. It would have stated on the product page that it could not be returned if it was an exception to our policy.
Edith
Incidentally, the gun the boy In Brownsville was holding was an Umarex SA177 CO2 BB gun. The press is calling it a pellet gun.
Edith
Well, first of all initial reports stated as much. Specifically they stated that he was aiming at the officers. Second – it makes a LOT more sense that the cops would be highly reluctant to shoot an 8th grader and do so only under serious provocation than they’d be looking to plug a kid just so they can feel “paramilitary”.
The whole issue of how airguns look is besides the point. If someone wants a realistic airgun (for training purposes, collecting, or whatever) why should that be denied? Certainly not without very good reason, and there is no such reason. I’ve already pointed out that the consequences of relying on appearance can easily be deadly. It’s not hypothetical: Some time ago there was a story of a gang who painted their guns red, and the accompanying photo showed this done to a Hi-Point 9mm.
Just because risk is part of an officer’s job doesn’t mean that we should play fast and loose with his life.
Why didn’t they bring in an 8th grade negotiator? What are they going to do? “Please, young man, don’t shoot anyone until we get a specialist in here to convince you to surrender!!!”
Obviously, I’m outvoted. But as for calling in somebody later:
It was a response to a school; somebody from the school spoke to the cops. As far as I’m concerned not making a psychologist part of the response package borders on gross negligence.
As for why replica guns should be legal, you only say that if somebody wants to buy something, why shouldn’t he be able to. That’s not a good response, unless you want to go as far as, say, Ron Paul does: If somebody wants to buy heroin, why shouldn’t he be allowed to.
And yes, I am all for British-type policing.
With the number of school shootings in recent years I wouldn’t have taken a chance either, the cops got a call because a student just went in a classroom and punched someone in the face, they get there and the guy has a gun, what is he gonna do with it?
He’s ordered to drop the gun and he doesn’t, will he shoot one of the cops, run in a class room? I wouldn’t have taken the chance.
What if the kids parents had locked the pistol away? What if he couldn’t buy one before he’s 18 (and we hope more responsible)?
Things like this will happen, as long as guns exists, if hadn’t been an airgun it could have been a caps or water gun, he could have carved one out of wood (my friend and I had really cool rifles his father had carved for us), he could have carved one out of soap (there was a famous prison evasion here in the 70’s, the guy had carved a revolver out of soap, used shoe polish to black it out and hid it between his enormous butt cheeks).
The only thing we can do to help is educate people.
J-F
I’ll stick with my original comment from yesterday. Sad, but justified… I think the last thing we need here are un-armed “Bobbies”. More training, yes. Un-armed police, no. Trained and armed civilians, yes. Hasn’t resulted in the imagined “wild west” scenario yet…
/Dave
This subject is a passionate one for me since I was very close to a similar situation. Armed individual that did kill good people.
It’s tragic that an 8th grader was killed. He was ordered to drop the weapon numerous times. Failure to do so takes the situation beyond negotiations when you have potential hostages and policemen in harms way. It’s easy in hindsight to feel remorse for the kid that was killed and even easier to second guess other options in the comfort of your home, away from the nightmare and with the luxury of time to reflect.
It’s hard for me not to compare this to Columbine. I know many family members that would have been grateful if the police at Columbine would have taken out both shooters before their loved ones were killed or injured. 15 people, including the shooters, were killed at Columbine. 24 were wounded. Richard is in a wheelchair to this day. Anne Marie was paralyzed in the shooting. Her mother committed suicide 6 months after the shooting. Patrick was shot in the head but survived. He spent a lot of time at Craig Rehabilition for spinal and cerebral rehab. There’s more stories but these are the ones I remember after donating office space for free to create a counseling center for the Columbine Survivors.
It’s important to keep the survivors and their family in your thoughts when you grieve for the 8th grader that was shot.
Point a weapon at anyone, refuse to drop it when commanded and you deserve to be shot. Period.
The color and/or configuration of the weapon is irrelevant.
By the way, when a gun is pointed at you all you are likely to see is the size of the barrel and it’s huge. Expecting even trained officers to discern the difference between a BB/pellet gun when it’s pointed at them is unrealistic. In many instances you have merely seconds to decide whether to use deadly force or not.
If you don’t want to get shot don’t point a weapon at anyone.
kevin
I have to side with Vince on this one. The schools are extremely adamant to a fault about bringing guns, ammo, war souvenirs, etc. to school. It has been made very clear to students that it won’t be tolerated.
There have been too many situations lately where kids and adults have walked into schools and public places and opened fire on helpless people. And we even talked briefly on this blog about a similar situation with a kid on the playground who wouldn’t drop a replica pistol. He was shot and killed, also. Both kids, according to news reports, provoked the cops (if the stories are true) and paid the price. The article said the kid’s mother wanted an investigation because she wanted to know why three shots were fired at him when one would have brought him down? If I was a cop, I know I would certainly want to be able to go home to my own family rather than go to the morgue because of a berserker person, no matter what age, was waving a gun in my face.
If replica airguns wouldn’t look like the real thing people wouldn’t buy it (I know I wouldn’t).
J-F
J-F,
You made an excellent point. Why wouldn’t anyone expect airgun makers to make guns that look like firearms? In many cases, it is the same manufacturer, even incorporating some of the same parts in both.
The problem does not lie in the guns, anyway. It lies in the people who misuse them.
The kid in question here obviously took the gun to school hoping anyone he threatened with it would think it was a firearm. The police obviously did.
If they thought the kid had a firearm, he would have been a threat not only to the police, but anyone else, too. Anytime someone points a gun at you, that gun bore is going to look plenty large.
Trust me on that one. In the heat of the moment, can the police be expected to tell the difference between a .177 bore and a .22 one? For that matter, should a cop be expected to take a .177 airgun hit in the face rather than shoot?
Les
I hope you all have had a chance to read today’s account of this shooting tragedy. According to today’s article the kid was clearly in the wrong and they have audio of the encounter, and he was not shot in the back of the head as earlier reported. The side of his head had damage in a manner caused by a fall not a gunshot. I’m sure well hear more in the next couple days.
-Chuck
Some of the bullies in schools are real monsters. And how are the cops supposed to know the kid didn’t take Daddy’s gun out of the nightstand drawer at home?
They don’t, and the folks who would restrict our firearms freedoms get the chance they will spin this just like they always do. My old man wore a gun to work every day and not once did any of his seven children ever think about touching it, or taking it from his dresser. It’s all about education about the proper place and use of weapons, and our liberal school systems will have none of it. They only ban and that provides the attraction. Especially to bullies and underachievers who will always find a way to hurt someone. At least there was some positive press on self defense with a firearm when that young lady in Oklahoma used one to protect herself from a home invasion. I wonder how an individaul in the UK would have fared in the same situation?
Good air pistol buy
Everyone,
Here is a good buy on Gun Broker:
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=268753436
B.B.