Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Why do some gun writers site low recoil as equaling killing ability?

I think most people don't.

The flinch develops at the bench, not in the field.



P

and/or the shooting skills never get developed because they don't shoot rifles that hurt them...

David

A good crisp trigger does not make a rifle any more accurate but it does make it easier for it to be shot accurately. Same thing with low recoil cartridges vs big boomers.

Shoot 10-15 thousand 12Ga per year and most will flinch sometime or another, and it will not make a difference if you are shooting a .410, .22lr or .30-06. It just pops up and you never know when. Too many popped primers?

Little recoil may delay a flinch, but if one shoots a lot eventually it will happen. Then there is a recoil induced flinch and a visual flinch. They both end up with the same result. You have it bad when the forearm muscles tense to the point of becoming hard, but the finger can't pull the trigger.

I've flinched a good bit with both types on targets-mostly clays-but only twice that I can recall on live game.

Ok since somebody has said that I am imagining things here is the quote, "we used a 250 on deer and pronghorn with great success. I uused to wonder why as kids we never lost an animal with the 250. Now I know 250s mild recoil helped us place our shots just right"
I know that my title could use work but I also dont know how to describe it better in so few words. The second sentence provides a decent idea of what Im asking tho. I thought anyways.

This isnt an ancient article and no we wont discuss names, this isnt personal or slander/libel. I would never say that all writers do anything, except write of course. But it has been a fairly common phrase used often enough thru time Talking about purposely designed medium game rounds. Its just that. Id rather see something like, the lack of recoil helps but you still need to put a good bullet in the correct place.

*Implied. Not said, my mistake.

Regarding recoil damage, that makes a lot of sense! If a fighter can get punch drunk, a wrestler/grappler can get brain damage from being dipped in his/her dome too many times why not damage caused by lots of heavy recoil sustained over time??

Also the shotgun angle, I read somewhere like ten years ago that skeet/trap type competitors sometimes had to look at extreme fixes like a reverse trigger that fires on release because their brain would not allow the finger to pull the trigger normally anymore. Is that a real thing still??

Are you under the impression that if a child is handed a 30-378 weatherby mag as a ten year old that shot placement will not be effected?

Just trying to figure what your angle is.

Seems to me that in the hands of a youngster the 250 would bring home more
Meat?

Shod

A comment I made has predictably been dropped from the conversation.

I have always believed that muzzle blast is a greater contributor to flinch. As someone who tended to specialize in bigger bores and magnum cartridges, I watched people closely when they shot my, or test rifles which I loaded and shot on a public range.

It was my observation that perceived recoil caused more flinch than actual recoil. If a shooter believes he will be belted before he takes the shot, he will be convinced he was right after the shot.

I first noticed this 30 years ago when there was a few 20" barreled rifles released onto the market such as the Model 70 carbines, Steyr Manlicher Stutzen full wood carbines and the Weatherby Vanguard 20" carbines. The 7mm Remington version taught me a lot about many things from perceived recoil to suitable powders in short barreled magnums, which is a common topic here on the fire.
John

And to be fair to the OP, I just read an article in American Hunter on hunting Alberta deer touting a "accurate, flat-shooting caliber such as .25-06 through any of the .300 Magnums". Even past 400 yds my .260 Remington fits that bill, as does the .243 Winchester, without excessive recoil and plenty of energy downrange. It will take something extraordinary to reach for anything more than my .260 Remington with a 129 gr. Hornady Interlock or 130 gr. Nosler AB. It just gets the job done, time after time and doesn't pound me to death. Add on top of that the fact that I can load cast bullet loads for target practice and get loads of target time in for about the same price as current .22 LR ammunition costs.

Definitely.

A lot of shooters believe a flinch is all mental, and can be overcome by practice and concentration. To a certain extent that's true of an "early-onset" flinch, caused by introducing somebody who doesn't know much about shooting to a firearm that hurts them. A lot of people do this inadvertently, because they don't realize not everybody feels the same things when a firearm goes off. This kind of flinch can usually be overcome by sufficient practice with a firearm that doesn't hurt.

But what might be called a long-term flinch is caused by plenty of popped primers, as Battue stated. One of the greatest professional shotgunners of his era, Bob Brister, suffered from this kind of flinch, simply because he was addicted to shooting. He shot so much his brain eventually subconsciously refused to pull the trigger, because his body had taken so many rounds of punishment over the decades. He eventually went to both lighter-recoiling shotguns and a release trigger, but eventually even that solution doesn't last.

I once hunted ducks and doves in Argentina with Bob when he was around 70, and had been shooting a release trigger in competition for a while. For that trip he brought a shotgun with a standard trigger, because he worried somebody might pick up his release-trigger shotgun and have an accidental discharge. He shot pretty well during the first, duck-hunting part of the trip, because the limit was "only" 25 a day and he didn't use many more than 25 rounds to kill them.

But when we switched to doves, with unlimited shooting, by the first noon his brain/body connection often refused to pull the trigger. I once watched him stagger forward four paces while he attempted to use his whole body to pull the trigger, and it just didn't happen. And that is not unusual in shotgunners who pop 10,000 primers or more a month, as Bob did.

I had a brush with the subconscious effects of cumulative recoil maybe 10 years ago when I went on a prairie dog shoot with a company that had just introduced a new varmint rifle. The rifle was actually designed for coyotes, with a medium-weight barrel chambered for .22-250, weighing about 9 pounds with a scope, but it's far easier to test new varmint rifles on numerous prairie dogs, rather than relatively few coyotes.

We started shooting about 10 o'clock one morning, and aside from a little lunch break, shot until late afternoon. Then we got up the next morning and started all over again. By mid-morning the .22-250 started feeling more like a .375 H&H every time it went off, and I realized I'd started flinching. Yeah, I could overcome it by concentrating, but shooting had really ceased to be fun. I switched to a .22 rimfire and the flinch went away.

On any such test I make it habit to put my fired cases in a duffel bag, in order to keep a round count. It turned out I'd fired about 600 rounds of .22-250 ammo. So now I know my 24-hour limit of what most people would consider light rifle recoil.

I didn't miss it; picked up a 26"-barreled 6-250 here a few years ago and noticed that right away. Blast is much more flinch-inducing for me than recoil, although they often go together.

I wasn't attempting to be "snippy", but wanted to highlight the noise aspect, I think goes with recoil and even as a separate contributor, can be damaging to accuracy and shooter performance.

JW

I agree about blast being an important factor, especially after witnessing a green young shooter take a shot with a very short barreled 243. The kick hardly moved the boy at all, but he was clearly bothered by the report and wanted no part of another shot.

Veddy, veddy intadesting, John.

I have never considered myself a flincher, or recoil sensitive in any way. It truly has to be a cannon to bother me. BUT, I'm am sure everyone, including myself, has their limits. I guess maybe after so many rounds, recoil may subconciously take a toll on even the most experienced of shooters, once the body has absorbed a certain amount of "damage".

I hate brakes with a passion. Especially someone else's that is shooting next to me. But even on my own guns, I'd much rather the recoil than the muzzle blast/percussion.....

Steven Jay Gould once wrote about how evolution tends to weed out the extremes of traits in an ordinary environment. I think it applies to firearms. Using rifles of adequate power to do the job if the bullet gets where it needs to go, but not so powerful, heavy, and loud that they are hard to shoot and induce fear and flinching, is the same thing. Try to hunt deer regularly with a 17 Hornet, you're apt to lose a lot of game for lack of range and killing power. Shoot an .300 Ultra for average deer hunting, or even elk, and you may find (or not, but keep using it anyway) that it's just too big to place shots well. That fairly large range in the middle ground (lets say from around the .243 to the .30-06) is where most hunters are going to find the most success, I think. And I think I may have made this connection from reading a gunwriter many years ago, so I will give credit to whomever put the thought in my mind. I'm wondering if it was Mule Deer?

I dry-fire a rifle more than a little, and sometimes, even when I know there will be no recoil, I can feel the shoulder pocket tense at trigger pull.

+1. I was at the range today, shooting a 243, 260, and 7-08. Not hard recoilers but all the rifles were lightweights, one NULA, one Kimber, and one custom, so they had some jump. I was shooting prone a lot, and I shot pretty much continuously, rotating the rifles and burned probably a hundred rounds. Toward the end I felt worn out and "punch drunk."

It was good practice, and I got a lot done. I couldn't imagine shooting that volume with any hard kickers in the mix, which goes back to the original point about volume shooting being much easier with lighter recoiling rounds/rifles.

Shod,
noo nothing of the sort. Im saying lack of recoil doesnt make the 22 Hornet or 221 Fireball a solid deer round. Although yes it will kill, the fact that they were not designed for that purpose means you will need a really good shot placement. The rounds that I referred in the original post are designed for taking deer and similar animals are much more versatile in their abilities and do not need premium bullets to do it. Thats all.

The stuff about flinch, recoil and muzzle blast is really interesting! I know muzzle blast of short barreled magnum handguns is a good example of that.

Learned long ago -- I flinch for noise. I double protect and use a PACT pad, too, because eventually recoil does hurt. Bench shooting for .416 Rigby load production lead to headache by shot #17. Better to shoot off bags put atop two seats on the bench.

Having gone through load development for rifles up to .375 Wby before, practicing off sticks is much less traumatic. Can't imagine taking the punishment of endless shotgun use...