 3.57 Texan for some testing. Nice. Oh, hey guys. It's ironic you guys caught me grabbing a Texan because today we're headed for part two of our series with Tom Gaylord talking all things air guns and today we're talking big bores. Let's do it. The world has changed. Sure. Big bore air guns. They've been around for hundreds of years, but nobody knew it. And then all of a sudden in the 90s with Dennis Quackenbush starting it off, they started becoming available and now, well you know it, Tyler, we're up to 800 foot pounds with these guns. But are they going to go higher? That's the question, right? I suspect it is, yeah. You know, never say never. They probably will. I think they probably will. But I don't think they're going to jump like they've jumped in the past. I think the increases are going to be more incremental. Will the projectiles get heavier? Let me stop right there. I can give you a gun that has 800 foot pounds, but the lead is a cylinder that's so long it wouldn't be accurate past 10 yards. Or I can take the same piece of lead and chop it in thirds and shoot a 200 grain piece of it and I can put five of them into an inch at 100 yards. Now, with me, I'm the rifleman kind of guy. I want the accuracy. Agreed. But you don't sell guns with accuracy. You can. You can, but mostly you sell them with power. Well, you need the power to go along with it. And foot pounds, yeah. Yes. So yeah, I think they are going to go higher. I don't think they're going to go much higher. Thousand foot pounds? That's what I want to see personally is a thousand. And I think it's because it's a good marketing number. It's not necessarily, is a thousand going to be that much better than 800? The buffalo will still be as dead. Right. I would think so. Personally, I think some of the things that we're seeing with those big, very, very big game coming down with air guns, it's a lot of aero guns, which is for good reason because you throw a broad head on something going 400 to 500 feet a second and there's really nothing that can stop it. Well, no. And that's why they're using them. It's very, very effective. But on the other side of that, I'd really love to see more of the slug firing guns out there getting some play in that realm. And I have seen some videos of Texans taking bison and hammers taking Cape Buffalo, things like that. But it's not, I don't think it's widely accepted yet. Well, Cape Buffalo, you've got to go to some kind of a game ranch in bison too. Yeah. But most guys are going to want to hunt deer and pigs. Sure. Pigs, they're ubiquitous here in Texas. They're everywhere. Right. They're shooting them from helicopters. But deer, well, deer are being more populous in every state. And that's why states have legalized air gun hunting too a lot. We're only at, I think, in the mid-20s in terms of number of states that have big game or large game regs on their books right now. I don't know what the hesitation is personally. A lot of its folks has to do with money. A lot of these air gun manufacturers, just simply retailers, everybody in the process does not necessarily want to pay federal excise tax, which would get them probably going nationwide sooner than later if everybody agreed to pay there was a 10% FET on everything, which goes back to conservation, so it's usually a good thing. But I understand why they don't, because that's going to get passed along to the consumer, right? And prices are already high and whatever. Sure. But personally, I've listened to a lot of these conversations at the state level where you have people on both sides talking about why air guns should or should not be legal for hunting in their state. And I think there's just a lot of, even still, a lot of misunderstanding about the true efficacy of a big bore air gun. Right. I don't necessarily think foot-pounds of energy connects with people because at the end of the day, most folks don't know what their 300 wind mag or 308 produce in terms of foot-pounds of energy. They know they're shooting a 168 grain bullet at really fricking fast and deer goes down, right? Like it's pretty straightforward. But when they see an air gun, even when they see 50 cal, it's really hard for them to connect those dots, I think. Sure. And I don't know how you change that without getting the guns in people's hands, of course, which is great. I'm not sure we can change that. That's education. And you and I have been trying to do that for years. It's a slow process. And when we get an educated group, along comes a bunch of new guys, and we got to start all over again. Well, and I think it's a lot of people that are traditionalists and see air guns as like a fad or something that hasn't been around for hundreds and hundreds of years that Lewis and Clark used. When they hear that stuff, they're like, whoa, this has been around for a while. Yeah. Yeah, it has. It has. But you were talking about the efficacy of air guns. I think of black powder. I think of shooting slower bullets, but they're larger bullets. They make a bigger hole, but they don't have the hydrostatic shock. And that's what air guns do. You know, as a archer, when you shoot an animal with an arrow, it doesn't go down instantly. Right. It might run for a couple hundred yards. Right. You don't want it to, but that's the way the world turns. And I've seen animals shot with air guns, big boars, and they just stand there. Now, we don't know what's going on in the animal, but my guess is it's stunned. It's got this tremendous pain. Things are going real bad real quick and it doesn't know what to do. And if the hunter doesn't charge the animal trying to figure out what to do next, eventually the animal falls over. Well, does that make people upset because it took so long for the animal to expire? Archers have to get used to that. Sure. Big boar air gunners have to get used to that, too. That's a very real thing. I think there are a lot of people that don't, they look at it as a gun. Yes. And with a gun, when they shoot a deer, the deer goes down. It goes down. Right. And that is just simply not the case. Right. Like, to your point, we're not developing hydrostatic shock. Yep. You are not getting that, like, liquefying of internal organs. Right. You have to hit vitals and then rely on that animal bleeding out. Bleeding out. That's the reality, folks. Yeah. And that's okay. That is extremely ethical. My gosh, people have been hunting with spears. And what do you think they do? Right. Sure. It's okay. Right. But you've got to have a mindset going in so that you're not shocked when you see it the first time. Yes. And you also have to have, like, I tell people this all the time. If you're looking to hunt with a big boar air gun, you need to think about it from an archery centric perspective. Exactly. Because you shouldn't be taking shots at hundreds of yards. Right. Or even 100 plus I would contend. Like, you should be focused on 50 yards and in interactions with game. And it's not that hard to do, right? Like, you just have to change your approach, whether you're in a blind or a tree stand or whatever. And can you get that close to the animal? Right. That's part of the sport. Yes, absolutely. That's what makes hunting interesting, in my opinion. Yes, it is. So I think there's, I guess to circle back on it, the state level stuff when we're going to see, I don't know, 40 or hopefully all 50 states one day adopt, you know, big boar air gun hunting is a real thing. I think that's going to take some time. It's a very politicized conversation. And sadly, there's a lot of money involved. But we do have good organizations and good manufacturers and retailers. And there are tons of people involved with like the ASA that are doing a really good job of trying to rally support for these things at the state level, but it does take time. Even in states like Ohio where we're at, which has I think like first or second most white tail deer in the country, like it's a struggle. And there's a lot of like BS and bureaucracy behind the scenes. I'm going to tell you a little story. I'm older than you. I don't know if you knew that or not. A little bit. A little bit older than you. Yes. When I was a kid in the 1950s, there were almost no white tail deer in Ohio. You couldn't hunt deer in some years. And when you did hunt, you had to use a shotgun. And there's been conservation. And some of the money that goes into fishing game ends up repopulating that species. It's actually been good. Yes, there's more houses, but the deer are also in greater numbers. Last time I visited Pyramid air, a coyote ran across the road in front of my vehicle as I was driving to see you guys. So you got game now. Absolutely. I was just talking to somebody telling him that I was driving into the office the other day and I turned the corner down the road that the building's on. And you know, there's like an eight point buck standing right on the side of the road. How about that? I was like, let me go grab my dragon claw. Let's go. Yeah. So look, at the end of the day, I mean, hopefully more states come around. And as far as what air guns will do, I mean, in terms of what some of these manufacturers will do when we talk about power, I don't know. But I definitely don't think we're topped out. I think we both agree on that. I would agree. All right. Awesome. Thanks for coming along today as Tom and I talk all things big bore air guns. 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