Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters How do you rate/ choose cartridges

I think you are all wrong. I can kill all of those animals with my Ruger 10-22 using yellow jackets.....

What's the problem with that? Does this make you feel superior in some way?

A lot of truth right there.

I covered pretty much all my hunting needs with a with a couple of rifles chambered for versatile cartridges with complementary capabilities that are easy to find ammo for and easy to reload; .30-06 and .243. One of these two will go every hunt that requires a centerfire even if as a back-up.

With my "needs" covered, every other cartridge I buy or load, 7.62x39, .30-30, .300 Savage, .303 British, is incidental to a rifle I like.

Expat

There's a lot of "wrong" cartridges in the right rig that I'd have a hard time passing on. And the right deal can throw the ballistical skullphuck out the window.

Huh?

In other words, if somebody wants to spout off about how much of a POS a 25-06 is and decided to throw it away for cheap 'cause it ain't "cool", I'm on it like flies on schit.....

The older I get the more I dislike recoil.

I'm a much better shot with a lighter-recoiling cartridge. It's placement more than anything else, anyway.

So I'm a 7mm-08 shooter, with handloaded 140 gr Partitions.

Bulls, antelope, and bucks so far.




P

OK - Got ya now.

Matter-of-fact, I got an old ain't cool Enfield bout that same way!

How much weight retention?

Curious as to how things like this go... I wrote an article for my blog on the subject of caliber/rifle selection that will be going up today some time. More on the tactical side of things, but it applies to hunting rifles equally, I think.

Most of us select rifles and/or calibers for emotional rather than practical reasons. We want "that rifle" in "that caliber" because we saw it in a gun store, or a friend had one at the range, or somebody shot a moose or prairie dog with one on a TV hunting show, and it stirred something in our imagination to the point where we began to think we actually NEED that rifle/caliber.

I think of Mule Deer's story, mentioned on here a few weeks ago, and the story in his book that it came from... his Inuit guide had 2 rifles, a 30-30, and a "22 Mag-a-num". Practicality led David to use his "mag-a-num" for almost everything, including polar bear. Most of us modern American riflemen aren't that simply practical.

I'm as guilty of this as the next guy. That's why I have a safe full of rifles, and why I buy and sell rifles as often as I do.

My first rifle was a sporterized .303 Enfield. This was the "standard" rifle most guys started out with in Alberta back in my young day. I knew a number of men who had never owned anything but a .303, and had killed everything and anything with their .303, and didn't see any need for anything other than a .303. Buy a box of 20 Imperial 175 gr cartridges every couple of years and you're GTG. Lots of freezers in Alberta stayed full with that combination.

I'm sure you could say the same thing about .30-06 mil-surp/sporterized rifles here in the lower 48.

I finally "graduated" to a .308, because at that time I couldn't get varmint bullets in .311" diameter for varmint loads, but there were plenty of varmint bullets in .30 caliber. So for a while, I shot everything from moose to coyotes to p-dogs with my .308.

Now I have all kinds of rifles and bullets and reloading equipment and so forth, but I don't need any of them. I'd be just fine with one .308 and call it good. Anything I buy/shoot/load for these days is because I want it, not because I need it.

A good share of the time it's by impulse.

I've done a lot of the impulse thing. My Grandpa, my dad, and my uncles all used only .30-06's and they proclaimed it to be the end all, be all. When I was 13 my dad put a .30-06 and 180 round nose 'brush busters' in my hands. It wasn't long before I had my own job and started searching for 'my cartridge'.

For some yes, that's true. We all go through that stage, dumb as it is.

What i have done lately is carefully examine the cartridges that are most popular on the CF.....and then get something else.

Bob,
I will join you in that.
I really don't get the desire to get something "different" because of the "cool factor".
Actually there isnt much difference in many cartridges.