Tahnka,

Good post!

I developed a miserable flinch by the time I was 14, even though I'd been a pretty good shot with a BB gun and .22 from a fairly young age. The rifles that did it to me weren't even as powerful as the .30-06: a 7.62x54 Mosin-Nagant and a Savage 99 .308. It took me until age 20 to get rid of the damn flinch, and the rifle that did it was a Remington 700 BLD .243 Winchester.

A lot of shooting with the .243 (including 17 big game animals) got me to the place where I could start working my way back up the ladder again. Now I can shoot some darn big guns pretty well, but also have acquired enough experience to know they're not necessary for 99% of the big game hunting in the world, having taken quite a few animals bigger than deer with cartridges like the 7x57.

I also never had any trouble killing deer of any size with the .243--or .250 Savage or .257 Roberts, which are pretty much the same thing. Every time I hear stories about the inadequacy of the .243 as a deer cartridge these days I tend to assume that something other than the cartridge was the problem.

“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.”
John Steinbeck