We give away a lot of guns at Guns Save Life monthly meetings and last year we featured a couple of DPMS full-auto short-barreled rifle BB-guns. They were more popular than free pizza. As the dad of fun-loving seven-year-old twins, I bought one myself.
The plan was simple: present it to my boys at Christmas. Santa, however, somehow forgot to check the gun safe before leaving the North Pole. Classic.
I finally handed it over earlier this summer. The memories that resulted were pure Mastercard commercial worthy…priceless. The boys were full-auto addicted in the first magazine of fire. They now prefer this little beast to real rimfire pistols and even their Savage Rascal. That’s high praise from a couple of kids learning what actual gunpowder smells like.
How it works (and why it’s smarter than it looks)
The DPMS runs on a pair of CO2 cartridges in the magazine and cycles at roughly 1,200 rounds per minute. Trigger control matters if you want the fun to last more than a second or two. Pull the magazine and the whole thing goes completely inert—no residual gas, no “one last BB” surprises. You can safely set it down while you reload without worrying that Junior is going to do something unsafe with the “gun” while you’re working on the mag.
Velocity sits around 450 fps, solid airsoft territory. That’s plenty of punch to blow through cardboard and paper targets at 5 to 10 yards. CO2 lasts for a solid five-ish mags before you notice things slowing down.
The boys, bless their hearts, immediately started planning home-defense tactics, wanting to keep this under their bed: “We’ll shoot bad guys in the eyes and the balls, Dad!” I laughed. Good on them for identifying soft targets and tactics. I’ll handle the actual bad guys, the same way I used to handle the monsters in the closet. That’s what dads are for.
The one thing you should run from
The store offered a 60-round magazine for about $80 that’s supposed to make loading easier with its own BB reservoir. I bought one. It did not work especially well, even after reading the instructions, and it completely failed after three cycles.
That was a genuine disappointment in an otherwise excellent package. The “standard” magazine works fine. Sure, it takes a minute or two to reload with the included reloader, but that’s good. The delay allows memories to stack and anticipation to build.
Price of admission to the smile factory
The gun itself runs about $180. Add a case of fifty CO2 cartridges (good for three or four solid range sessions) and a pile of BBs and you’re good to go for under $250. No waiting period. No 4473. No paperwork. No FOID here in Illinois. No special transportation rules. Just pure, unfiltered fun.
Used as a crew-served device—Dad holds and stabilizes while the kids aim (or don’t) and mash the trigger—even five-year-olds will do just fine. The adjustable stock helps, too. The grins are enormous. I can’t publish the pictures because of certain court rules in my divorce, but trust me: ear-to-ear, pure joy and over-the-top, jumping up-and-down excitement.
BBs are cheap. The experiences you create and share with your kids or grandkids are priceless. This little full-auto SBR is one of the easiest ways I’ve found to make long-lasting, incredibly positive memories and at the same time, plant the seed that shooting is fun, exciting, and worth doing right. In a world that spends a lot of energy trying to make the next generation soft and scared of guns, that’s no small thing.
Just leave the 60-round mag on the shelf. Everything else about this gun is a great memory-making machine.
Lastly, it brings out the kid in adults, too. Grins, giggles, the whole nine yards. For those who don’t live in full-auto freedom states, this gun is awesome. For those who do, this is an inexpensive entree into safe, full-auto fun.