Pellet Guns

About Pellet Guns

• Pellet guns are 12-bore pump-action shotguns classified as less-lethal kinetic projectile weapons used for crowd control and dispersal.
• Working Mechanism:
  • Loading: A cartridge containing hundreds of small pellets is loaded into the pellet gun before firing.
  • Firing Process: When the trigger is pulled, the propellant inside the cartridge burns and produces high-pressure gases that push the pellets through the barrel.
  • Pellet Dispersion: After leaving the barrel, the pellets spread over a wide area instead of travelling as a single projectile.
    • This wider spread makes the exact point of impact of each pellet difficult to control.
• Key Features of Pellet Guns:
  • Wide Pellet Spread: A single 12-bore cartridge releases about 500 pellets that spread across a wide area after leaving the barrel.
  • Less-Lethal Design: Pellet guns are intended to disperse violent crowds without causing immediate fatalities, but they can cause serious injuries at close range.
  • Variable Ammunition: They can fire metal, rubber, or plastic pellets according to operational requirements and force escalation protocols.

Pellet Guns in India

• Manufacturing: Pellet gun ammunition used by security forces in India is associated with production at the Ordnance Factory, Ishapore.
• Protocols: Pellet guns must be used only as a last resort after other non-lethal methods fail.
  • Security personnel must follow graded force and, as far as practicable, aim below the waist while using minimal force.
• Operational Deployment: The Union Government introduced pellet guns in 2010 as a less-lethal crowd-control option.
  • They were first used by the Jammu and Kashmir Police in Sopore and later adopted by the CRPF and Rapid Action Force (RAF).
• Use in Public Order: Pellet guns have been used during crowd-control operations in Jammu and Kashmir and have also been reported in Manipur in 2023 and the Punjab-Haryana farmers’ protests in 2024.
• Indigenous Alternative: Following concerns over pellet gun injuries, India developed plastic bullets through the DRDO’s Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory (TBRL), Chandigarh, as a safer alternative to metallic pellets.