Air rifles legal in Texas for big game

Last week, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department gave the nod to allow the use of air rifles for big game hunting this coming fall/winter season. The passing of this new law was a long time coming. Many other states have learned that rifles developing 500 foot pounds of energy with bullets propelled by 3,000 psi of compressed air develop more than enough energy to cleanly harvest big game.
I believe one of the big reasons that game departments have been slow in allowing air rifles during the general hunting seasons is lack of knowledge. When air guns are mentioned, most folks think of the “pump up” pellet rifles of yesteryear. Today’s PCP air rifles charge to 3,000 psi. air pressure via a pressurized scuba or lighter carbon fiber air tank. Most first time shooters are amazed at the power of these rifles.
more:
http://www.ntxe-news.com/artman/publish/article_110430.shtml

Good.

Sweet..... now to get an air rifle

I wouldn’t say 500 ft. Lbs is “more than enough” energy to cleanly take big game

The old minimum was considered to be 900 ft.lbs on impact.


I don’t really care one way or the other but I will say this will probably result in more wounded game.

What are the benefits for individual hunters & the hunting community in general?

Kind of my thoughts as well, maximus. Why should we be hunting big game with air rifles? The debates on here run wild with which calibers are and are not suitable for white-tailed deer. Yes, a .22 LR will kill a deer but is it the best tool for the job? Nope and neither is a pellet rifle shooting a .177 or .22 caliber pellet.

Today's air rifles are not the same as the 177 and 22 are not the same as the pellet guns of our youth.

I know that, what caliber is the projectile? Today's bows are not the bows of our youth either, but many deer are wounded and lost by archers.

https://www.airgundepot.com/airforce-texan-ss-hawke-scope-combo.html

$1280

Years ago seen Keith Warren doing a show bout air rifles.

These air rifles are of large caliber but not flying all that fast. Most have less energy than a .357 magnum handgun, which is considered marginal for deer hunting.

I’ve seen a few you tube videos of people killing hogs with them. My question is “why is this something you would want to do”?

Mine too. But I think I know the answer..."Because I can."

I'd much rather have a bow in my hand than an air rifle. hell......guys get flack for shooting deer with a .22 hornet.....which has more power than a lot of these air guns

Only way I see it taking off in Texas is if they make a special season or lump them in with say a muzzle loader season.
I've not seen anything that says they will be allowed for use on deer. Big game can mean hogs and predators.

Hogs and predators are not big game animals and are already legal to take by any means or method. No, I think these guys are talking deer to Cape Buffalo. Not that a PH would allow it on a dangerous game hunt.

I posted a few videos myself when I first joined this forum. A good friend and hunting buddy was sent a Benjamin Rouge to field test, and it most definately got field tested. LOTS of different projectiles got tested on pigs from 15 to over 200 yrds. 357 energy from the muzzle @ 3,000 psi but with the right “pellets” were consistently getting pass through’s up to 200 yrds on 200 lb average sized boar hogs. Those that didn’t pass through still killed. Must admit, was a lot more effective than I thought it’d be. Why you ask? Why not. It’s different, it’s quiet, and it’s fun unless you have to carry it stalking in the corn crop country.

The ones I heard are LOud

The Rogue sounded about like a 22 mag on the high setting. Hit with authority though. That particular rifle would be great still hunting, it gets old fast stalking with it because it’s long and heavy. There are many other HP air rifles to choose from nowadays, and there are others that know a lot more about them than I do but, if they’ll kill mature pigs at “average” hunting ranges they’ll have no problem killing deer.

This.

It is just another hunting "tool".

ranchers better hide their obnoxious cattle

Umarex has a new one called the Hammer that shoots a 50 cal bullet 950 FPS.
You can shoot a 180 grain 45 sabot 1100 FPS.
Many think they are quiet but they sound like a potato cannon. Not really loud but not quiet either.

how many will own up to wounding an animal with .22 or .223

Cool. More hunters in the field and sport. I would think with the hogs moving into urban neighborhoods, this would be a good option to kill them with.

I think most of the city ordinances have that covered with the use of BB guns.

How many will own up to wounding an animal with a 270, 30-06, or 308? I've seen and tracked many wounded that will never be admitted to in public.

It is where those ft lbs of energy and the projectile are placed with any weapon that makes a difference in death or lost animals. How many ft lbs of energy is your bow producing? Were you considering that when you killed your pronghorn?

With my current set up it’s producing like 69 lbs of kinetic energy. But once it gets there it has a 2” broadhead that opens and leaves a nasty hole.

Hard to compare a broadhead to a bullet in terms of killing power.

A pellet isn’t gonna have a lot of hydrostatic shock

You'd be surprised, I was.

Rifles and bows kill by two separate means. Comparing them from a physics perspective is folly.

If anyone doubts the killing power of a big bore airgun, I recommend searching YouTube for TeamWildTV's Benjamin ePCP hunts. Using 2 of the different models, the guy has killed kudu and gemsbok with it at archery range.

Also, Jim Shockey shot a bison with the Benjamin air bow. Thing was dead as heck and I would wager it's easier to pull a trigger and send a bolt at 400fps than it is to draw a compound and get ~300fps.

I'm glad Texas did this. I doubt I'll ever get into hunting big game with airguns, but I'm sure others will/are.

And whoever is saying "why do you need to kill a deer with an airgun"...many an anti-gunner ask the same of the AR-15...

I doubt it given how many more much more powerful rifles do such a poor job at producing hydrostatic shock, I have my doubts on air rifles doing it. Most can't muster much over 1000 fps in the .30 caliber range, much less up to >2600 fps. https://www.ballisticstudies.com/Knowledgebase/Effective+Game+Killing.html

The folks behind the camera are good friends of mine. For some reason the part where there is 3' of blood squirting out of the pigs skull got deleted...and there were some other good videos that are gone now, but anyway... That rifle got stretched out later. Big bore air rifles are deadly. More deadly than any sub-sonic ammo if you stretch them legs....

If it’s on YouTube it must be taken as gospel

I hear you. I don't know measurements on impact, I just know dead pigs..and that 357 caliber bullet from an air rifle produced a lot of dead pigs.

Burnt

Y'all can have the air guns, I would like the state to approve the use of slingbows for hunting game.

I'm waiting for the atlatl to have a special season

I have used a couple different air rifles. They kill hogs plenty fine. DRT.. What I don't like is that most are one shot and reload. The second round isn't coming fast. Dealing with the air tanks is annoying also. My thought is that it is a novelty. Not going to be someone's go to in general.

Your words not mine. I'm just saying they kill stuff. Another good YouTube search is of the Alabama deer kills by the same Benjamin airguns.

I can’t see them as anything more than a novelty either. Buy one, kill a hog or varmint or two - then put away because too much trouble when the novelty wears off.

That is sort of how I see the muzzle loaders and single shots like Thompson Center guns...novelty/diversion/something neat to do/try. Most of the big bore higher power air rifles fit into this realm, as you say.

One thing air rifles may do is open up "rifle" hunting to felons and disallowed individuals who cannot possess firearms.

They allow felons to hunt with them. Felons can own them.

LOL, I heard that somewhere before.

Yeah. I didn't read anything but the op and remarked on it.

Felons have been using muzzle loaders for years to hunt with.

I'm not a felon & recently applied for a security job, at a guard gate, no firearms good pay, bennafites & didnt pass back ground check. damn Gov. been spying on me ever since filling on workmans comp.

I’ve posted several videos of my .257 AirForce Condor. I rule of thumb is 1 fpe per pound of body weight. My gun shoots a 80gr Hollow Point at 1025 fps which produces around 170 fpe. The gun has a shrouded barrel and is about as loud as a .22 shooting CB’s. I’ve killed 4 pigs under my feeder before the rest figured out they were dying. I have video of a 150+ pound pig I killed with a heart shot from 130 yards.
Not to bad for a B.B. gun.

So about the same energy as a .22 mag I’m guessing

Here's my Evanix Sniper, it's a 9mm/.357 caliber. It has a 7 shot rotary magazine and uses a side mounted charging handle, but you're only going to get 3 or 4 shots max before the air pressure and fps drop off. It's easy to fill with an air tank, but you wouldn't want to be lugging that stuff around and it's about a 5 minute process to use a high pressure air pump to get from 2000 back to 3000 psi. I run a Wolf Airguns Suppressor from the UK (shown in second photo with my buddy shooting). The first photo is with a barrel shroud and suppressor for the Evanix Bullpup. It's quieter with it, but not nearly as quiet as the Wolf. It's not whisper quiet with it on, but it easily reduces sound by over 50%. I have no intentions of hunting with it, and had it not been given to me with some repairs needed then I wouldn't own one.

That all said, it's fun to shoot and pretty crazy when you think about how fast a large pellet can fly.

I shot a 50 cal air rifle a couple weeks ago and it's pretty gnarly. It was the Airforce Texan. It had some pretty solid penetration with the 260 and 3xx grain pellets. The air tank is pretty small and drops about 500 psi per shot though so it really needs a recharge at each shot.

Lewis & Clark carried an air rifle to hunt deer sized game.

It's more complicated than that. More like a HV .22 long. It's also about retained energy and accuracy. My rifle will blow a hole through a 2x4 at 128 Yards. What I like is I can often times put a second shot through the same hole. And don't forget I may get 3 or 4 shots off before what ever I'm shooting alerts.

Instead of bumping an old thread here is a post I made about a December hunt of mine. The video is horribly done as I have been told and doesn't have any voice over but if you will watch until the end you will see a really big hog I shot from 128 yards with my .257 air rifle. I might add that in the video I'm fooling around trying to focus the camera, knocking stuff off the shelf and bumbling around for the first minute or so, then once the camera is focused you can see the barb wire is right in the wrong place, so I fumble around trying to get a shot free of the wire.

12/18/17 Post
My hunting lease has seen a 10x increase in the number of hogs since the drought ended. As such it was not uncommon for the blasted pigs to show up just before prime time or spook off deer in the middle of a hunt. So a couple years ago I started fooling around with airguns to run these pest off without ruining the hunt. I first had a highly modified Crosman CO2 gun that was not reliable due to all the modifications. I found a local Texas Company in my hometown that was making these really powerful and accurate air rifles call AirForce Condors. I bought one of their Condor models in .25 caliber and began reading up on how to make the gun more accurate, more powerful and less noisy. So I settled on a different barrel (.257)with an added noise shroud, a ultra high pressure tank (3650 psi) and a different valve and hammer to make it all work. This is what all that looks like:
Now that I introduced the gun I will get back on subject. The nice thing about air is you can tune the rifle to produce the FPS you desire, in my case that would be 1050fps. Knowing my barrel is a 1:16 Twist, stability is optimized at this speed with a bullet of 80gr and .625" long. Here is a bullet i pulled from a hog last weekend that was shot at 128 yards, it is a 80gr NOE Ranch Dog hollow point:

The bullet was sticking out the far side shoulder backwards!
They say the proof is in the pudding so here it is. I got to the lease and went out Friday morning to deer hunt but I always take the Condor just in case Miss Piggy wants to party. At 9am the pigs show like clockwork and I was able to get 2 shots off before they decided they were dying and left. Neither pig went more than 20 yards and they were shot at 117 and 128 yards:

The bullet above came from one of these pigs. Friday evening I go back to the blind. At 4:30 a group of young pigs come to the feeder and are spooked by the feeder going off. Over the next 30 minutes I shoot two hogs with my air rifle and see several deer at the feeder but nothing on my hit list. I recovered one of the hogs Friday night and found the other later about 50 yards from the feeder:


What's cool is I got this hunt on video. These two pigs were also shot at 117 yards (under feeder) and 128 yards (back of feed pin):

I can't say this was my best hunt ever because Saturday I went to the Emergency room with a severe sinus infection. However, Sunday I recovered enough to go back out and shot another young pig with my airgun, unfortunately my aim was off. Finally, I used my GSP (Rosie) to track the shot pig in hopes she could locate it down in the thicket on the side of the ridge. Well sure enough she found it and 4 or 5 others in the thickest mess of briers and horns you have ever seen. I worked myself down and through the thicket and circled the dog and the hogs she had bayed. They came running right toward me and stop as soon as they saw me in front of them. At this point this big spotted Sow busted out of the thicket running down the ridge to my right. I had my AR at the ready and was able to take down the big sow as it ran through a clearing. Man that was exciting!

Not Too Bad For A BB Gun