How powerful are BB and Pellet guns?

in this episode we're going to talk about power how much power does a BB or pellet gun have? How dangerous are they? we're going to shoot various objects in order to find out first i'd like to point out that BB and pellet guns are not all equal in power they start is low as 250 feet-per-second and go as high as 1,650 feet-per-second. which is over six times more powerful but those are the same velocities as real firearms, like this one Does that mean it is just as powerful? definitely not in order to calculate power need more than just velocity you also need mass. Remember your physics class where you learned that energy is mass times velocity? typically the total energy is measured in joules. so, let's look at the difference in mass. Here's a 22 long rifle round. Let's remove the projectile from the casing in order to get a fair comparison this particular round has a weight of 35 grains. now let's compare that to a seven grain pellet and a regular steel BB. so this 22 bullet would have 120 joules of energy where the CO2 BB pistol with have about 4 joules. A high power pellet rifle can have as much as 82 joules. and airsoft pistol would only have a measly 0.05 joules. OK, lets start the real experiments First, lets start with the spam test. I do the spam test in most of my videos, but this will give you a better idea of what those numbers mean. First, I tried an airsoft gun rated at 400 fps. as you can see It dented the front of the can, but that's all. Also keep in mind that airsoft BBs are so light weight that they lose velocity very quickly when they fly through the air. So at 10 feet away, it is likely it wouldn't even dent this can of spam. when i did the test on the 350 fps pistol, I rated it at 0.75 spam. when I tested this 680 fps pellet rifle, it went all the way through the first can and almost half way through the second can. giving it a spam score of about 1.4 I don't have any really powerful air rifles handy at the moment but i'd expect a spam score of around 3 to 4. but for comparison i've decided to try a real gun. I used a .22 long rifle round made by CCI, rated at 1050 feet-per-second. don't try this at home The result... It completely entered and exited 6 cans penetrating the 7th can and denting the back of it. that gives this gun a spam rating of 6.9 the highest you'll likely ever see on my show i decided to try something else people often wrap objects in denim when testing regular firearms. i thought i'd try that on t pellet pistol rated at 450 fps. looks like the denim didn't protect this can of spam. it took awhile to locate the pellet, but I finally did and as you can see, it still penetrated three-quarters of the way through the can. if that had been a person's leg they'd be in the ER getting the pellet surgically removed. okay so here's a question can a low power CO2 pistol like this one go through a wall? let's find out I'm using a scrap piece of drywall for testing. I'll be using this BB revolver and this pellet pistol for testing. Both are rated just over 400 feet-per-second. These are 5 shots from BBs and 5 pellet shots. Looks like 4 of the BBs went through uh. One got stuck. as far as the pellets, it looks like two went through and three got stuck. You might find yourself asking why did it not penetrate through each time? A quick little science lesson, it has to do with this. These guns are powered by CO2. every time you fire a shot, some of the liquid inside this canister turns to gas. If you rapid fire very quickly, you don't give enough time for the gas pressure to build back up. so if you watch the video closely you'll notice that the first two or three rounds were always the ones that penetrated through and the remaining ones have less power.