Injuries are always grave concerns in any extreme sport, and are accepted as part of any sport and we always go to great lengths to prevent or minimize such injuries through rules and protective equipment. We always take any report on airsoft injuries seriously, but we responsibly use proper data and information as reported by authorities and medical professionals.

68 Caliber, the paintball website, published a story titled “Injury Statistics Compare Paintball & Airsoft” last September 16. The title of course, is something everyone in airsoft and paintball should be concerned about. As the author states in the article:

"You all can peruse the facts, figures, footnotes and percentages for yourselves (but only because we’re giving you a link) at your leisure;  what 68 Caliber wanted to point out was that while reporters and gatherers of such information are lumping both air soft and paintball together, the statistics reveal a very interesting (perhaps telling) divide:

and that is that far more injuries are being reported for airsoft than they are for paintball.” (Underline,l emphasis and italics ours).

The first thing that any discerning reader should do is to check the report that the article was referencing from, which was the “Emergency Department Visits for Injuries Caused by Air and Paintball Guns, 2008”. Initially, we assumed that air guns and airsoft related injuries were lumped together in this report giving a higher number than paintball. Surprisingly, these are the definitions of air guns and paintball guns in the report :

“Air guns fire a metal object—either a ball bearing (BB) or a pellet. Paintball guns shoot a gelatin projectile containing non-toxic paint.” (Italics, emphasis and underline ours)

The author should have stopped right there as airsoft guns fire plastic projectiles, not metal. Thus, airsoft guns are not referred to by the report. Undeterred with such obvious definition the author misrepresented that all eye injuries mentioned in air guns were related to airsoft:

“On the other hand, ONLY a total of 92 eye injuries were reported for paintball, while a whopping 728 were reported for airsoft.” (Italics, emphasis and underline again ours)

We want to stress again that the report says the injuries are “air gun” related and never was there mention of airsoft.

We do recognize that some reports, not necessarily about injuries, tend to lump airsoft and air guns together. However, this report is obviously by the mere definition of air gun as firing a metal object, is about air gun and paintball related injuries.

Eye injuries are the most pressing issues in air guns, paintball, and airsoft and thus more medical experts focus on this. There is a more recent report written by Mark Vaugham, MD, who is popularly known as “Dr. Airsoft” of Airsoft Medicine. Called “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out! (Or… It's all fun and games until someone sustains a blinding ocular injury.)” which is the most recent report on airsoft and paintball eye injuries which was published in 2010, as compared to 68 Caliber which was 2008. We suggest that you check his article out.

We asked Dr. Airsoft what he thinks of the 68 Caliber article and he commented on the story at 68 Caliber. However it was withheld by 68 Caliber and he forwarded his response to us:

"The referenced report lumps all 'airgun' injuries together.  This is because the data was mined from the International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes reported at the time of diagnosis of injuries.  The ICD [does] not differentiate among types of airguns.  This data cannot be used to make any comparison between paintball and airsoft.  There are articles which can be used to compare airsoft to paintball.  Since the only injuries common enough to have reports in the medical literature from airsoft and paintball are eye injuries, that is where we must look for comparison.  The largest study (Kratz A, et al: Airsoft Gun-Related Ocular Injuries: Novel Findings, Ballistics Investigation, and Histopathologic Study. Am J Ophthalmol 149(1). 37-44. 2010) studied 59 airsoft eye injuries and found that airsoft eye injures are relatively minor. Most cases recovered with little to no loss of vision if treated quickly. The mean follow-up visual acuity in the injured eye was 20/25.  There are no published reports of loss of vision from an airsoft injury.  This is in contrast to the severity of paintball eye injuries.

A case series claiming to be the largest paintball series reported eight enucleations (Alliman KJ, et al: Ocular Trauma and Visual Outcome Secondary to Paintball Projectiles. Am J Ophthalmol 147(2). 239-242.e1). An enucleation means that the eye was so severely injured that it had to be removed. This is because it is not unusual for paintball eye injuries to be as severe as actually rupturing the globe (eyeball).  This same study found half of the injured eyes to have a visual acuity of worse than 20/200 (including the eight that had been removed). Only one-third on the injured eyes had visual acuity 20/20 to 20/50.

The medical literature comparing airsoft (not all air guns) to paintball finds that paintball as more severe injuries.  This is because of the difference in the amount of energy transferred from a paintball to human tissue.  A paintball has on average 10 times the mass of an airsoft bb causing it to have higher kinetic energy.

For more information read:  http://vaughanmd.com/drairsoft/shooteyeout.pdf"

The email exchanges reveal how proper information is disregarded by the author:

From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sat, September 17, 2011 9:25:55 AM
Subject: comment on 68caliber

Dr. Mark,

I appreciate your comments and the article that you forwarded, but it is as potentially biased as you seem to be indicating the article on injuries was.

No where in your piece does it contain any information about the total number of injuries - nor do you reference improper classification issues from the various reporting gathered (which I've seen time and again - airsoft injuries mislabeled as paintball injuries (and obviously so when they talk about removing a plastic sphere from the wound).

I agree that "airgun" lumps together both airsoft, BB gun & etc. injuries (same classification problem) and stated so in follow-on commentary.  I'm going to hang on to your comment but not publish it, as I think it will only contribute to future confusion.

Thanks again,

Steve Davidson
68Caliber.com

Ha!? Future confusion? Though it's obviously the author who is more confused, referencing to something that is: a) already dated (2008) as compared to Dr. Airsoft's article (2010); b) obviously ignoring the definition of an air gun as firing a metal object in the research he referred to; and c) ignoring the references that Dr. Airsoft mentioned in his comment.

Furthermore, withholding such educated reply coming from a medical professional smacks of irresponsibility. We would rather have the readers decide for themselves when presented with information as is, and not using misleading titles to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) on a hobby that is seen as a competitor, and one that is growing fast that even the Paintball industry in California resorted to rent-seeking to block the growth of airsoft with their support of the now dead SB 798.

Here's the reply of Dr. Airsoft to 68 Caliber's non-posting of his comment:

Dear Steve,

Thank you for your reply.  I encourage you to read the articles referenced in my comment.  You will find the information requested.  The reference below documents a study where various objects were shot at human cadaver and porcine globes to compare the effect.  It confirms the information in my original comment.  There is no question of what the missiles were used in this study because they plainly list separate trials using metal rods, paintballs, arisoft bb's, and metal bb's.

Risk functions for human and porcine eye rupture based on projectile characteristics of blunt objects. Kennedy EA - Stapp Car Crash J - 01-NOV-2006; 50: 651-71 

I can appreciate your unwillingness to share this data with your audience as it would alienate them from your website, but it is not right to continue to keep the article posted which changes "airgun" to mean "airsoft."  Please consider removing the article now that this discrepancy has been identified.

Sincerely,  

Mark Vaughan, M.D.
www.airsoftmedicine.com

It seems the 68 Caliber author doesn't want to delve into the impact of paintball guns on eye injuries, we would rather point him and everyone to this actual story about a young woman, Hailee Garrett, who experienced a drive-by paintball shooting:

“Her injuries are as follows:  a substantial divot out of the cornea with lacerations, a torn, detached and partially missing retina, damage to the macula due to a choroidal rupture, optic nerve damage, a torn and tattered iris and a misshapen pupil.”

The teaser photo above used in this story is Hailee's eye after it was hit by a paintball projectile.

Here is a video with Dr.  Daniel M. Miller of the Cincinnati Eye Institute who was part of the team that produced the report cited by Dr. Airsoft. To quote starting at 1:21 in the video:

“Paintball gun injuries in particular, 1 out of 5 patients needed their eyes removed as a result of the injuries. 50% of patients who sustained a paintball eye injury ended up with blind eyes.” 

Click on the screenshot of his video interview uploaded at Youtube below as embedding the video is not allowed:

It's better to listen to medical professionals who have a better understanding of such injuries and can help us minimize or prevent the risks to injuries when playing such sports, rather than reading a story that distorts the whole picture which frankly, contributes to confusion rather than be informative.

If you want to know about injuries and protection for airsoft players (and even paintball players), you can always check out Dr. Airsoft by listening to Airsoft Medicine stories and Podcast. There you can get better information from a medical professional who understands the sport.