How many rounds to do shoot a year? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
Not directed at me but it seems to be a recurring question in this thread. In an average year I'm in the over 1000/under 3000 round group.
I no longer own ANY fixed power scopes, all of mine are variables. When I was younger I had several cheap variables go out on me, over the last 15 years or so I've been buying higher quality scopes and haven't had a failure of any of them. My dad did have a leupold vari-xII 3-9 on a 30-06 go bad about 12 years ago, and I saw a friend's .338 RUM eat a Swarovski a few years back.
I'm not going to argue that a variable is on average as reliable as a fixed power scope, but failures of quality variables are so rare now that it's not something that concerns me at all. There comes a point where the reliability is good enough and today's better scopes are well past that point. Certainly I'm not going to accept the performance limitations that come with using a fixed power scope to guard against the tiny chance of a scope failure. Using that logic we'd all be carrying rifles with open sights since they're more reliable than fixed power scopes. Heck, rifles can break too so why don't we all switch to spears? Surely they'd be more reliable.
I find the whole argument that today's quality variables aren't reliable enough to trust on a hunt to be kind of silly. Scope mounts themselves are much more likely to cause trouble than a quality variable in my experience.
Petzel's right about scopes, and I've always enjoyed his writings.
