Barrel length and airguns

by Tom Gaylord

A lot of airgun performance depends on the length of the barrel - especially when the gun is a pneumatic or CO2 gun. I'd like to share some observations on barrel length.

Length has zero effect on accuracy
This myth has been kept alive for decades, probably because the American rifles of the 18th and early 19th century made in Pennsylvania were so much superior to those of Europe. Their longer barrels did help them burn gunpowder more efficiently, but they had no direct effect on accuracy. One important indirect effect was that the greater separation of front and rear sight made for a finer sight picture. That did help accuracy, but it was only a side product of the longer barrel. Today's Olympic target air rifles use a tube that houses the barrel and stretches the sight distance as far as possible, while their actual barrels remain less than 16 inches. As an aside, John McCaslin got part of his inspiration for the Talon SS that has an enclosed barrel from these Olympic target rifles.

Olympic target air pistols with barrels of 10 inches or less are just as accurate as the rifles! That should prove that barrel length has no effect on accuracy. But some folks just can't stop believing that if the pellet or bullet is under the barrel's control for a longer time, it just has to be more accurate.

A longer barrel makes an airgun more efficient
Let's be honest, this isn't just true for airguns. A revolver might shoot a .357 158-grain bullet at 1,200 f.p.s. while a lever action carbine might shoot the same bullet 300 f.p.s. faster. And if a shooter knows he will be shooting .357 rounds in his rifle only, he can load them with slower burning powder and get even better performance. Those rounds would perform very poorly in a handgun because the barrel isn't long enough to burn the powder completely, but in a rifle, they zip!

Winchester recognized this fact around the turn of the 20th century and made 44/40 rounds just for rifles. So the myth that the cowboy went afield with a handgun and a rifle both using the same round hasn't really been true for about 100 years. Yes, both guns were chambered the same, but you couldn't shoot the rifle ammo in the sixgun because of excessive pressure.

In the airgun realm I need go no farther than the Talon SS to illustrate this fact. With the standard 12-inch barrel, a .22 caliber SS shooting 14.3-grain Crosman Premiers gets 830 to 850 f.p.s. on the highest setting. Install the optional 24-inch barrel and the same gun shooting the same pellet gets over 1,000 f.p.s.! Yet the accuracy of the 12-inch and 24-inch barrel is identical, with any variations being peculiar to a specific barrel without regard to its length.