A young statistician recently contacted me, saying he's worked out some new and better stuff about accuracy. I've only looked at part of it so far--but the most interesting aspect so far is that I've been wondering about the AMERICAN RIFLEMAN'S protocol for testing rifles with one load, which is five, 5-shot groups at 100 yards. I had my suspicions this started back in Townsend Whelen's day, so asked the editor. He'd recently done some research himself and found out it started when General Hatcher was in charge, though it may well have had its roots with Whelen.
The interesting thing is that when I told the young man about this protocol, he sounded very skeptical--but then got back to me a couple days later and said he'd put it through his system, and it's actually pretty good--far better than he would have guessed!
Anyway, there have been a number of people research how many shots it takes for a group to reveal the actual potential of a certain rifle and load. I'll look at several in the article, but many come down to similar general conclusions--none of which involve 3-shot groups.
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” John Steinbeck
