What Is the Quietest BB Gun?

If you are wondering what the quietest BB gun is, look no further, as we have the answer for you.

In our testing, the Daisy Buck is the quietest airgun. Coming in at 82.5 decibels, the Buck is about the volume of a popped knuckle. Most airguns are at least ten db higher, or ten times louder.

So why is the Buck such a quiet gun when so many others are relatively loud, and what other quiet BB guns are out there?

Quiet BB Guns

Here are some other BB guns and their volume levels. This sample is fairly representative of what you will see for BB guns, so the Buck is by far the most quiet BB gun on the list.

A lawn mower is about 90 db, but the way that the Decibel scale works is weird. It is logarithmic, meaning it doesn’t grow in a straight line. A noise at 110 db is not 1.1 times the volume of a 100 db noise, it is 10 times the volume of a 100 db noise. A jump in volume of ten db is a jump in volume of ten times, so the Red Ryder has a volume that is much greater than the Buck.

What Makes A BB Gun Loud or Quiet?

There is a lot that goes into this answer, and most of it has to do with how the air leaves the gun. As the compressed air that is used to push the projectile leaves the gun, it comes into sudden contact with the uncompressed air around the gun itself.

As the air from the gun seeks to expand, it violently comes into contact with uncompressed air, and that in turn creates a large boom. The more energetic the air is as it leaves the gun, the louder that sound is.

Ironically, this means that pistols are louder than rifles, provided they are using the same charge level, ammo, and so on. Curious, I tested this out on a BB gun pistol powered by a CO2 cartridge, and on a rifle, also charged with CO2. The pistol was much louder, coming in at 104 db, while the rifle was 97.4 db.

The longer the barrel, the more time and space the air has to decompress, giving it less energy when it leaves the gun. Alternately, less air means less noise, or you can combine both of those to make a gun that is very quiet.

Silencers make reduce the noise level by breaking up how the air expands, so it is less uniform, and has more space before it leaves the barrel entirely.

Because springers have moving parts that also make noise, they are going to… make more noise. This is why generally, a springer will be loud, even though they use very small amounts of air and have longer barrels.

The Daisy Buck is a gun with a pretty small barrel also, and with a spring, but it isn’t very energetic with the air it pushes out, and because it doesn’t use a lot of air each shot, it is a very quiet gun.