Jeff doesn't need any support for the points he has offered here. That doesn't mean that there aren't some who will gladly stand with him even in disagreement. (I do, and quite unapologetically.) It was BT, not Jeff, who came out rudely in taking offense with Rost's opinions. On the one hand, I can see where Jeff is coming from with the Second Amendment stuff and the Mini deal. Then again, any company who builds the weaponry with obvious multi-generational rugged use capacities that Ruger does seems hardly opposed to Second Amendment issues, even if their primary motive seems to be money. Now, if Ruger was pawning off something like the the multi-way weak products that Remington has put out - with an obvious focus on the bottom line and with seemingly little concern for rugged longevity, well, that would be a definite problem for me.
All that said, on the recent hunt I just returned from - after riding 500 miles to hunt caribou, I took two rifles. One was a Remington, a well proven Model Seven. The second (back-up) was a Ruger. I had seriously considered bringing a #1-A in 7 x 57, and it would have been fine for the hunting we did. However, since snow, overflow, and wet were without question over the span of those miles, I opted to go with two shooters whose glass/plastic composite and chrome/nickel metallics were unlikely to be phased. The trip ended up being a success. We got our daily limit of five caribou apiece, and we got everything safely home without damage. My partner didn't need his back-up, a Winchester, since his Ruger worked flawlessly; I didn't need my Ruger as the Remington performed flawlessly. The weapons worked better than either of the shooters. But, a picture of composite and nickel/chromium metal ain't worth ten words let alone the bandwidth, so.........; and besides, they weren't #1s anyway.
