Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Have rifles, chamberings, scopes, and bullets finally hit the wall?

I like the good improvement in hunting bullets that I use.It has allowed us to use a smaller chamberings for the same effectiveness on game.This allows for a more portable firearm and it can turn your 7x57 into giant killer imo.Swift,Barnes etc are very tenacious and so outperform the old cup and core bullets on large game (elk).It doesn't however improved your offhand shooting and nearly nobody practices that.

Hate speech! (aka truth)

Gotta get to my safe space, pronto.

Well this is interesting considering we've had the Nosler Partition since about 1945-1950.which killed about everything world wide from that point on,and from such anemic cartridges as the 270 and 7x57 as well......

So if you had a brain and were heads up from 1950 on, you didn't have to use a C&C bullet if you didn't want. I am amused by those who think the use of dinky cartridges for BG hunting is some kind of recent phenomenon.In fact it's been going on for years,way back to the turn of the last century. Anyone remember Bell and all those elephants?

And Bitterroots and succeeding bonded bullets like Swift and TBBC have been around since the late 60's to early 70's. These are fully as good as the best out there today from a terminal standpoint on the biggest, and toughest animals on the planet.

So I have a hard time discerning when the Good Old Days ended and the New Age began. (?). I think it depends on when you started hunting and how much attention you paid. If your head was stuck up your ass in the 1980's you mighta missed a major phase of the whole bullet development thing.

Not that things aren't great today in the bullet department,but I have never seen anyone handicapped with the best of what was available 30-40 years ago. You just have more choices today and more to get confused about.

You can tell by all the "which bullet should I use?" threads.

Nowadays, of course, the pendulum often swings the other way: Many hunters don't believe big game (even small whitetails) can be killed "efficiently" with anything other than a monometal bullet, while others just as firmly believe in super-high ballistic coefficient bullets and twirling the elevation knob. It sometimes makes me wonder how in hell hunters killed any sort of big game before the year 2000.

Wow. I don't use monometals much, but from what I can tell a lot of guys have dropped down in bullet weight to get higher velocities, flatter trajectories and very good terminal performance.

If the Partition was the be-all end-all, Barnes Bullets wouldn't exist.

You can live a long, happy and successful hunting life and never use a Barnes.

There were some decent bullets even before John Nosler started selling Partitions commercially in 1948. The original Core-Lokts were pretty tough, and the Peters Inner-Belted was apparently even better, since it was sort of a semi-Partition.

But because Nosler Partitions were a LOT more expensive than other bullets available for handloading (including the also-new Hornadys, Sierras and Speers) most hunters didn't become aware of their advantages until Partitions started appearing in factory ammunition--because not as many hunters handloaded back then.

Even then the word didn't get out much because Weatherby was the first company to load Partitions in their factory stuff, and both Weatherby rifles and ammo were expensive. Eventually Federal started loading Partitions in some common cartridges, and in 1978 Bob Hagel published his book on handloads for American hunting, touting the Partition and Bitterroot for larger big game. That's when more hunters really started becoming aware of "premium" bullet performance, and more premiums showed up.

Even the Barnes X appeared in the late 1980's, but the early models had real problems, which is why many shooters didn't discover the "magic" of monometals until the TSX break-through in the early 2000's.

Nowadays, of course, the pendulum often swings the other way: Many hunters don't believe big game (even small whitetails) can be killed "efficiently" with anything other than a monometal bullet, while others just as firmly believe in super-high ballistic coefficient bullets and twirling the elevation knob. It sometimes makes me wonder how in hell hunters killed any sort of big game before the year 2000.

I keep hoping CCI will start loading Partitions in their CB short ammo so I can kill pigs deader. I'm patient but the years are creeping up on me, so I hope they do it soon.