Richard Black is the designer and manufacturer of Reaper Custom Paintball guns. He is a former Marine Infantryman who served honorably during the late 80’s early 90’s. Richard has served over a decade as a Law Enforcement Officer in a northwest suburb of Chicago Illinois. He is a state certified Master Firearms Instructor, Factory trained AR-15 armorer, and FBI trained Sniper. Reaper Custom Paintball started in 1995 with a problem. How do you train police officers to survive gunfights? Well the only way to train them properly is to put them in a gunfight against a live target that thinks and adapts to the changing environment. Now we can’t just go around shooting each other…or can we?

Richard came up with the idea from one of his favorite pastimes, paintball! Why not put cops into live force on force gunfights with paintball guns instead of live ammo? Now several other training companies had the same idea and but their guns were standard paintball guns which had no resemblance to real firearms. This is where Richard’s personal love of firearms, paintball and gunsmithing came into play. Over the next 5 years and several thousand dollars of research and development later the Reaper Custom Paintball gun was born. A realistic copy of the M4 carbine rifle! Unfortunately Richard was too late to introduce his new idea to the law enforcement training world and a company called Simmunitions, which use real firearms to shoot .25 cal. ,paint tipped, plastic bullets at 450-750 fps, had already filled the law enforcement training need.

Well that was the end of Reaper Custom Paintball guns, not hardly! Richard took his idea straight to the paintball world. The idea was met with some skepticism and a lot of resistance because the paintball guns were too real! After a long search Richard and Reaper Custom Paintball guns found a genuine appreciation of the design in the Milsim Paintball community and he has been producing high quality, realistic, paintball guns for them ever since.