The Evolution of the Paintball Marksman

By Jayson Orvis

Many of the wise men of paintball will tell you that the paintball sniper does not exist – and I must confess to having my own doubts as well.

On several occasions, I have combined the best shooting paintball guns with the best shooting barrels, fed with the best paintballs made and topped them all off with a point sight. To make the sniper experience complete, I even strapped on a ghillie suit and headed into the field to press the advantages of precision shooting and stealth.

And so dressed in my sniper best with the most expensive electro-pneumatic paintball gun that money could buy, I began to crawl about the field during a number of Saturday forays – looking to prove the sniper myth a reality.

I had some magnificent plays. Once, I belly-crawled across our entire back boundary to come within 15 yards of the two best players that our opposition could muster. In a brief skirmish, I sent them both packing to the deadman's hut. But, I never came close to achieving my visions of one-shot eliminations. Though my ghillie was wildly effective and though my game of stealth paid rich dividends, I was no sniper. With or without a sight (and with or without enormous amounts of practice shooting) I was no better aim with my whiz-bang electro than I had been with any other paintball gun I’d owned previously. In the end, it took a string of shots to eliminate each player. No matter how ghillie-flocked my camo and my gun, I was still shooting ropes to get the job done.

My quest for elite sniper-dom would have to wait, as the frosty winds of winter had begun to stack the sodden, snow-weighted clouds up against our mountain fields. Spring would be my next chance to test the sniper myth.

Winter brought early snow to our hometown – the kind of bottomless snow that barricades you inside and forces your creativity to run deep. As the snow settled on the silent woodsball™ fields, determined engineers of Special Ops Paintball hovered over their CAD programs, leaving their wives and sweethearts lonely under their blankets as the machinists labored over the mills and lathes. The engineers were brainiacs, obsessed with a vision of the first perfect sniper paintgun, and they would not yield to a decent night’s sleep until they had revolutionized the elusive genre. Then, one day, all the lengthy discussions and dry erase drawings coalesced into one gorgeous prototype. The Longbow Sniper was born.

The waning days of winter saw the engineering crew slaving again, this time to purge the gremlins from the thousands of lines of machine babble that would eventually command the insanely complex, but hopelessly stupid robot machines in the art of Longbow construction. And the production line began to ease out the Longbows (and at last there was one for me to call my own). From parts rejected by the parsimonious eyes of the quality control inspectors, I cobbled my Longbow together, along with two extra magazines. A mark or two in the matte black anodizing couldn’t detract my surging enthusiasm as I anticipated my renewed pursuit of the sniper’s title.

After waiting all this time for my sleek and steady Longbow, I was fiercely committed to christening it properly. I would not dash impulsively into the field. Instead, I dedicated several hours to working up paint-barrel matches and sighting in my lovely Hakko Panorama point sight. With all the intensity of a Swiss clockmaker, I worked up the ranges and holds for my Longbow and the Marballizer paint that I had thoughtfully selected. At the range of 30 yards, I could hammer a soda can with almost every shot. By shooting groups at precisely 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and 60 yards, I worked up the average hold that I would need to maintain in order to put a ball on target at each of those distances. I even tucked a tiny rangefinder into the upper pocket of my vest and I taped a card with my holds at each distance onto the side of the rangefinder. I was ready to pull out the rangefinder to calculate exact shots at extreme paintball distances.

And that is how I arrived at the river bottom paintball field one spring morning, prepped like a paratrooper over Normandy, bristling with gear that I was uncertain would work. Poking up over each shoulder, I carried my two extra Longbow mags – 20 rounds each – poised to be snatched from their quivers the instant my first magazine ran dry. I showed up ready to give myself every concealment advantage that I could scrounge. I wore a full Action Ghillie suit mated to a ghillie vest and ghillie goggle hood. Even my Longbow was wrapped tightly in a ghillie gun rag. Only the pane of my mask and the foot of my boots remained uncovered by leaf.

The field boss called for an Attack and Defend game with ten Special Ops gunners to defend a hilltop against 25 local ‘ballers. After scanning the terrain for likely sniper hides, I lowered myself into the crook of a downed Cottonwood that covered two approaches to the back field behind the hill. I cleared three probable shooting lanes and then waited. The nervousness of a cornered rabbit gripped me as soon as the game began. Twenty years of paintball instinct screamed in my ear that I shouldn’t sit stationary -- urging me to get up and maneuver. But the mere 20 balls in my magazine stilled my angst as I was forced to face the reality that this would be a very different game from the thousands I’d played previously, running and gunning. Standing still was my best play and I would see it through, regardless of the outcome.

I had little time to wait. A lone enemy scout stole forward into one of my shooting lanes. I slowly shouldered my Longbow. Even with my mask and the ghillie hood, I was delighted when the small laser “X” of my sight floated effortlessly between my eye and the target. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how utterly liberating it would feel to shoot over a paintball marker that was uncluttered by a hopper. As the natural feel of my new sniper iron filled me with confidence, I squeezed the trigger gently and the Longbow bucked lightly in my grip. Without bothering to figure out where the shot had come from, the scout raised his arm and walked away with his gun in the air.

My spidey-senses were going berserk now, and I couldn’t stand another moment in the crook of that tree. I kept sensing other players, both to my flank and in the direction of the scout, and I concluded that my sniper’s hide had outlived its usefulness. I bolted upright and rolled out from between the branches. Scuttling closer to our base hill, I slid behind some light cover and stilled my breathing. As I had perceived, the crunch-crunch of the scout’s patrol was very close.

Taking the scout had betrayed my general position and the attack squad wasn’t going to grant me time to be selective with my next location. Out from some tamarack bushes burst a player who had seen me on the move. He had also identified me as the “sniper guy.” If I had to guess, before the game had even begun, this guy had been talking it up to his buddies how he would just run that sniper guy and his piddley 20 paintballs down like a dog should he ever find him on the field. True to his word, the player made a madman’s dash straight at me, gun blazing. My sight never wavered from the shooter as he bolted, though it took me an instant to remember to lead him as he ran.

Beneath the svelte exterior of the Longbow beats the thoroughbred heart of a Level Ten AGD Tac-one – one of the finest and fastest shooting mechanical tourney guns of all time. Even with a mere twenty balls in my horizontal magazine, the Longbow could shoot faster than any gun on the field that day. The ill-advised attacker took a couple of balls in the leg before he could come to terms with the shocking reality of it all.

“Did I hit you?” he asked hopefully after his charge had petered into a dejected trot.

“I think maybe you bounced one off my shoulder a few seconds after I shot you in the leg,” I said hoping that it would make him feel a little better.

He turned and drifted off, leaving me alone once again, to disappear into the hillside.

And, alone is how I spent the rest of my day. Connected to the team only by the wispy threads of radio chatter, I played a stealthy game of long shots and ghost flanks. My hits and victories were many, but they don’t begin to explain the feeling of accomplishment I carried away from that day (and that lingers with me still). The Longbow had opened up a new world of paintball mastery.