Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Can a person ruin a cartridge for you?

Sounds like a Patrick F. McManus story. 😂

I'm not easily swayed by what other people do or say when it comes to shooting sports hardware.

A lot of people opine about things that they've never actually experienced, often parroting what they've read on the internet. I think that in law-speak that is called "hearsay" and is not considered credible or allowed to be entered into evidence.

It's never happened to me, but if it does, it'll be because of Lee J. Hoots.

That person is a weak minded slug. That's like hating air because Hitler breathed it.

Anything less than .30al. Dad was an -06 guy. I started with a 30-30. My brother bought a 243 and I watched him put 5 fatal rounds into a deer once and it kept running and running and running. Now I own 223, 257, 6.5, 270, 7mm. Prejudices die hard. And I still don't like the 243.

If anything ever turned me off about any cartridge, it's "belted magnum". Dang few cartridges need a "belt". It's a "selling point" for magnum cartridges. (If it ain't got a belted case, it ain't a "magnum"!)

The other thing is "Weatherby"! 😖
The rifles are expensive and the ammo is expensive.
I'm not saying the Weatherby isn't a nice rifle, but too many more common rounds (.30-06 Gov't?) Can achieve the same result with less cost and less recoil.
I've seen way too many folks hauling a "Wby" through the woods simply for the "fashion statement"! (It's a Weatherby!)

At a gun range, a dad asked a local gunsmith why his 14 year old son couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with his new rifle?
The 'smith goes over to the bench where a slim built kid touches off a .300 Wby Mag, knocking the kid's cap off and almost rolling him off the bench.
"First, go get that kid something he can shoot. That artillery piece is too much for him!"
Pop bought the kid a .243 Win. The father/son duo had a fantastic Colorado mulie hunt with the kid taking the biggest buck with one well placed shot!

I never gave a rat'sass about what cartridge a gun is chambered in. I do care about the gun itself. Like John said, there's so little real world difference between cartridges in the same general class that more often than not you can just close your eyes, pick one, and sashay down the road whistling Dixie. Loyalty (or disloyalty) for a cartridge is kind of a bizarre concept if you stop and think about it.

I have a dozen .30-06's (I think, I'm not gonna go count them) - not because I feel it's the best cartridge of all time but because I like the guns it's chambered in. (Springfields only came from the Armory in one caliber.) It so happens that the '06 is a pretty good cartridge so it's kismet.

So many of the guys in our parents and grandparents generation could only afford one rifle. When one's selection of that one rifle (or one anything) is based on economic reasons it makes that item take on supernatural powers, whether deserved or not. Heck, that's the same basis for all the old "Ford vs. Chevy" debates when we were kids. No practical real-world difference between the two makes but the choice in family cars had to be justified/defended because after all the Old Man was saddled with paying for it.

Dislike of cartridges due to previous bad experience is similar to being turned off by food from previous bad experience. Ya know how if you eat a piece of undercooked chicken and get food poisoning, after that chicken tastes vile and revolting for a while? The chicken may be cooked perfectly, but the mind still goes back to the bad experience. There's a psychological component to it that defies logic.
Anytime I see someone show up at hunting camp with a 7mm Rem Mag, 300 Win Mag, or 300 Weatherby Mag, I have a similar feeling. Most guys just can't shoot them well, and there's a better than average chance their hunt will include a rodeo.

Except none of that is true. Hundreds of thousands? Exaggerate much?

Can a person ruin a cartridge for you?


No, I always shot what I wanted to. Never much cared what other people thought when it comes to guns.

[quote=Pappy348. .. still have my wits about me enough to make rational decisions.

[/quote]

What's rational about 5.7mm and .22 WMR autopistols? You're as bad as the rest of us.

Dad bought a 7mag when they first came out and another when that one was stolen. He would go to the range and sight in a handful of shots then complain about his shoulder hurting. My brother bought one for his first deer rifle - and flinches horribly. Never wanted one myself.

When I bought a 6mm Rem they both scoffed. Then, while cleaning a good axis deer I held my 6mm near the ribs and asked Dad if he thought the bullet would go clean through. He said "hell yeah it would" so I asked him why he thought it would be different at 100 yards? That got his wheels turning.

We soon replaced his (now muzzle braked) 7mag with a 6.5x55 cz550 and he LOVED it. My brother ended up buying a cheap Stevens 200......in 243 and is amazed how well it shoots ( you know.....when your eyes remain open).


I bought a 260 when they were the craze maybe 20 years ago or so. Remains my go-to. If re-doing I would likely sigh. shake my head and mumble "Creedmoor."

In fact just hooked up my future S-I-L with one as his first rifle.

Well, I pretty much ain't going to have what the new crop of magazine writers test and recommend as the greatest ever until their next review. Nor am I going to take for gospel from on high anything other shooters say until I've tried it for myself.

I try to evaluate the opinion of others by learning the basis for those opinions. Then, shrug and walk away. I'll make my own mistakes and form my own opinions. Writers of the late 60's said the 80 grain bullet in the .243 was just for varmints but that's all I had. I shot them through the chests of two deer.

This is page 4 and no one is reading anymore so I'll ramble a bit.

If anything, I've been talked into not out of cartridges. Been living mostly in North Carolina for a long time now. Felt a little silly shooting little deer with a 30-06. After reading quite a bit of positive reporting about it, bought a 243 (this was at the dawn of the 6.5CM and I didn't know if it would stick or I might be wearing a flat brim hat by now!). Nothing wrong with it per se but haven't had the results I like. That being a blood trail. A 50yd run in this hellishly thick brush can result in a lost deer with no blood to follow. I want to like the 243, I really do and may give it more of a chance but its hard to do now that I have aquired a 308 that paints the forest floor red.

I've also been talked into a 375R (for when I get off my butt and head over to kill Mbogo), a 9.3X62 (seems like a good way to swat a black bear or a nilgai) and most recently bought an old MK V 270WBY (cause I always wanted one)

As far as the liking one cartridge over another, I tend to agree with MD. I doubt a deer (or elk or black bear) could tell the difference between anything between a 270 and a 300. As long as you put a decent bullet in the right place. At this point I just want something I can feed with decent off the shelf ammo.

Talked out of, no, talked into...... Hey, its fun and my glass is half full!

I never was much of a fan of the .270 and frankly still not much of one. The only reason I had even one was a friend got a great deal on one, a commercial FN Mauser with a stock ugly enough to abort a lady crocodile. (Thanks Jack)Price was $75.00 and the gun was NIB. I still have it and it's still in that same ugly stock. It shoots way too good to change it. The year was 1973, a year when I went a it ape buying guns. That's also the year when I bought my first .308. I'd ben doing most of my hunting with a very bubba'd 1903 Springfield that weighed a ton, or so it seems when hunting at the 9,000 foot MSL level where the deer were. I had to find something much lighter in weight. I found a Remington 660 at the local hardware store on sale for $99.95 but the big problem was it was chambered to the .308 Win. I'd shunned that cartridge since it first came out and here I was about to eat crow because I'd said I'd never own one. After all, it was a 30-06 wannabe. I bought it anyway along with a 4x Bushnell scope and a Lee whack'em loading tool plus a pound of H335. Bought a couple boxes of Winchester 150 gr. factory to get brass. Damn! That little rifle kicked like hell and I was starting to flinch. My kids got me a set of hearing muffs for my birthday and the question asked was, "Where did all that kick go?" Well deer season came up and I took that little 660 with me with the 06 as back up and one the IIR second day of the hunt, I got a shot at a Mule Deer way out yonder. One of my hunting partners had wounded it and it was running off. I took a shot and the deer went down hard. My buddies came over and we paced it off at 426 paces. I never looked down on the .308 after that. I did go with 165 gr. bullets after deciding the 150 gr. messed up too much meat. It's been restocked with a lightweight synthetic stock and a rattle can paint job that shows wear from many hunts. It still will put three 165 gr. Speer Hot Cores into an inch when I do my part.
PJ

I've never understood why some people get so emotional involved about inanimate objects.

IMO cartridges aren't good or bad, they are just cartridges and all cartridges are designed to work within a set of performance parameters. With few exception, like the 22 and 6mm PPCs, most, maybe all, cartridges that have been introduced during the past 100 years are redundant in some way and could be replaced by other similar cartridges without any meaningful difference in actual performance.

Never ruined by a single particular person, but I sure get tired of people that proclaim how much better a particular cartridge is than its contemporaries when the velocity at muzzle exit is the same and the cartridge capacity is about the same !
Grendel and Creedmoor come to mind , and the vast majority of these Kool Aid drinkers have been shooting g less than 20 years- the rest are guns and ammo writing shills who don't care about how or what they write as long as it gets sold .
Cat

Not a person, no. My brother bought me a 7mm Mag with a bad stock that kicked the living hell out of me. First one I ever shot. I sold it after a half box, and have never liked the 7 Mag since. Except for that Husquavarna I did some work on once. Check-shooting it clover-leafed 5 rounds. Twice (first time might have been accidental, no?), and it had a good stock on it, with relatively mild recoil.

Guy just would not sell it to me for some reason. What an idiot!

Living on the farm, we had an old timer for a neighbor who took it upon himself to teach us how to reload and shoot rifles with open sights. He was a firm believer in historically proven battle cartridges. Ie. 6.5x55, 7x57, 303 British, 30-06, 8x57 and a whole bunch of American western cartridges as well. He always told us to avoid magnums for a several reasons, cost/consumption of powder/expensive rifles, unnecessary recoil, flinches that can occur, our type of hunting didn't require long range shots (300 yards and under). So we took heed as we clearly saw how good of a shot and successful hunter he was. Anyhow among our friends there were magnum type guys who would laugh at us for carrying old surplus "pea shooters" while they carried new Remington 700's in 300 magnums with big scopes and so on, but the tables turned pretty quick with time spent in camp. The look on they're faces when my brother and I would come back with game, most of the time one shot a piece, while they were empty handed from taking several poor shots on many occasions. This proved to be an issue among many of our friends as we noticed the trend of those carrying magnums would have horrible flinches and when they did shoot something the poor animal's had 3-4 shots all over the place. Seeing all of this gave me a bad taste for magnums and I avoided them for a while. I now have a couple magnums and do believe they have a place for certain applications but for most of my hunting I still reach for the classic standards.

I'm a firm believer in starting off with low recoiling cartridges, let the new shooter learn how to shoot and work up from there based off their comfort and capabilities.