Can you really train for competition with air guns? If you ask Tatsuya Sakai, a Japanese IPSC shooter, you most certainly can.

Sakai lives in Japan, where real guns are, for all practical purposes, nonexistent. He trained for Steel Challenge using nothing but AirSoft guns (legal in Japan) firing plastic BBs. The result of one year of practice with an air gun? He won the 2004 Steel Challenge, competing in the United States with a real gun.

While that’s a rare example, the...