Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters What's Petzals beef with the 7mm RM?

A friend and me were chrono-ing loads from my 270 Win and his 7mm RM. Both shooting 150g bullets. He'd been bragging for years how much harder the Big 7 hit than the 270.

The chrony read:
270 Win - 2960fps ave
7mm RM - 2675 fps ave

So chalk one up to me. But......


Since then he's worked up some proper handloads and now has that Big 7 shooting closer to potential. And now it craps all over the 270.

My rule of thumb is the 7RM will shoot the same weight bullets about 200 to 250fps faster, or for the same speeds the 7 will shoot bullets about 20g heavier.

The 7 is noticeably more gun, even though the 270 Win is my favourite.

Somebody after him coined a catchier phrase along the same lines: "There is no replacement for displacement"

The 7mm Rem Mag/ 180gr VLD @ 2975fps is simply a whole different animal. I would expect good bullet performance at 1100yds (in thin air) on elk sized game.

Anyway didn't mean to get any ones shorts in a knot!

Isn't the same for everybody, but he got old and it has physically caught up with him in his ability to tolerate the recoil. Some handle that with grace and some don't. He has chosen the path via his writing to bad mouth a superior performing cartridge for one of a lower velocity level that does work well too. Fact is, he must see controversity as a method to insure his readership, works for some here but not all. Never really cared one way or another what he thinks as I have my own experience to rely on. Most guys with 30+ years of hunting ,shooting and many different rifles chambered for cartridges thruout the spectrum agree with what gunwriters write when it intersects with their own experience. When it don't we quit reading them. When it does we think they are pretty smart for a guy who lives where they do. Some of them live where they can do all the hunts by themselves and shoot when they want to. They are the ones who tend to make us pay attn. to their writing unless it's BS. Magnum Man

20 years ago Petzal was one of the biggest magnum pushers. Now he's against them. Kind of like the guy who always buys a new Ford and thinks everybody else should too. But heaven forbid if one year he happens to buy a Chevy then he thinks all the Ford drivers have eggs for brains.

Petzal isn't the only "post magnum" gunwriter. Ross Seyfried did the same thing. In their defense, today's bullets make plain vanilla rifles like a 270 or a 308 a LOT more effective on game than they were decades ago, though both have always been more than adequate for whitetails.

When did Petzal go anti magnum? He's only comparing the performance on game between just two cartridges. The 270 Winchester and the 7mm Remington Magnum. Nor is he advising 7mmRM owner to switch to the 270W. Me thinks that people are reading too much into his opinion...

Maybe he realized that having the living schit kicked out of him wasn't much fun, and the magnums don't kill any better than standard rounds.

Most of us realize those things at some point; the controversy comes in because at any given time we are all at different points on the path.

I think Petzal has always been a 270 shooter,but I seem to recall he was also something of a 340 Weatherby and 7mm Weatherby shooter as well.I guess he liked mediums for elk.

Boddington is another gun writer who used the various magnums a lot,although he seems to have softened his stance quite a bit in recent years.

But then who among us has not played with stuff from the 7 Rem Mag on up at one time or another? You go through phases,and your opinion changes.