Sometimes it's nice to watch or read some videos or posts by other people trying to make us airsoft players have our feet firmly planted on the ground. I'm sure some of you will agree with me that holding an airsoft gun, wearing an impressive loadout, and looking so tacticool sometimes get into the head of airsoft players thinking that they have the tactical skills to battle it out in the real world.

What pisses me off are some of those who do Milsim games thinking that it is "real airsoft" as they do military simulation, even if not trained to do such, as compared to those who see airsoft as a leisure activity. For all the years I've been playing airsoft, there's no such thing as "real airsoft". Airsoft is how you play it --- be it Milsim, regular skirmish games, airsoft practical shooting, airsoft target shooting, and even airsoft backyard plinking. There is no one area in airsoft that can be considered "the real one." I'm rather for a more inclusive way of appreciating airsoft, be it for fun or for training as we all do have our own preferences on how we deal with airsoft. Let's be humble as each area of airsoft contributes to having more people taking up the hobby or sport.

TheHossUSMC has put up a short video explaining that airsoft is not training. I was first intrigued about the video before clicking the play button thinking that is another real steel user who is just making a rant against airsoft players. But going through the video, it's not at all a "put down" of airsoft as he sees the value of using airsoft. This is more in line with how Travis Haley, Chris Costa and a growing cadre of tactical trainers who have an open minded view of airsoft, embracing it, and see it as a valuable tool for training and developing tactical skills.

My take on the video is that he emphasizes airsoft a training tool, and playing with airsoft is in no way actual training, in the sense of tactical training, without proper instructions from people who train people to survive while going in harm's way. Even going to Milsim events, even if they have more realism like those Field Training Exercises that real soldiers do, as long as the participants don’t know proper movement and don't go through any AAR or debriefing on their courses of action, they're just that, airsoft players, not real soldiers (or "operators" which seems to be what airsoft teams call their members these days).

No matter how good we look in our loadout or how menacing looking our airsoft guns are, as long as we are not trained to do real combat, then we cannot say we have the tactical skills. But that does not prevent us from playing airsoft, since it's a game that has to be enjoyed in the first place. We can play cops and robbers, soldiers and terrorists, or whatever scenarios that we can think of to make playing airsoft worthwhile.

The story really is: airsoft players need to be grounded in reality even if our imaginations run wild when playing the game.