I have a real life that doesn't involve internet forums so if you have to wait an hour, a day, a week or a year for a response you'll have to learn to deal with it if that sort of thing is important to you. It's not to me. I don't know you, I don't answer to you, I don't care how many posts you have on a forum that implies that you spend more time here than out there, I don't owe you anything and I don't spend time thinking about you or this when I'm doing the things that
are important. If you want to hunt elk with a .270 Win that's your choice. Regardless, if you really need to talk to me then come up to NW Montana and we can have this conversation face to face. I'll show you around the office, introduce you to some hunters who don't use a .270 Win and we'll set up the conference room so that you can talk to the entire company and educate all of us Montana hunters as to why we're a bunch of macho idiots for using anything bigger than a .270 Win. You can explain to one of my best friends who spent 20 years as a MHP officer, and who's a seriously good shooter who's hunted this state for over 30 years, why he's an idiot for reversing his decision a couple of years ago to drop down from a 300 WSM Browning A-Bolt to a .308 Win Montana 84M for elk hunting after a day hunting with his brother outside Great Falls. You can explain to him that his brother must be incompetent since the three 180gr TTSX bullets that all ended up under the skin on the far side, two of which went through the lungs and one of which passed through the heart, still allowed a nice bull elk to walk 30 yards and almost topple over the edge of a coolie. You can explain that a .270 Win would have been so much better because it's all about shot placement and holes.
I do care about my hunting experience and my interpretation of data combined with that of numerous coworkers and friends that have hunted up here in MT and all over the world for years, have taken hundreds of animals, work in the firearms industry and don't spend their lives on forums. I care about the experience of my good friend who's been a professional guide for 30 years, who is paid to speak all over the country and who won't use anything smaller than a .300 Win Mag for elk. He's not on this forum though so what does he know. What a loser! He just guides, speaks at events, has a hunting show and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing what he loves. Yep, a real ignorant loser! Like I stated earlier, I don't know anyone who hunts elk with a .270 Win anymore. Does that mean the .270 Win is a bad choice, I don't care. Maybe it's because everyone I know and work with live and breath MT air, many were born here, many have been here 40+ years. You really need to come up here and convince me and others that we're idiots.
I don't have the impressive qualifications of the 20,000+ crowd here but I do have two degrees in mechanical engineering including an MS, have been shooting, reloading and hunting for decades, worked for Remington as an R&D engineer, have a couple of patents pending related to military projects and firearms, spent more than ten years as a research engineer on military projects and currently work as an engineer in the firearms industry in addition to consulting for a couple of other non-compete companies. What I've come to accept it that
everything is statistical probability and a whole lot of Gaussian distribution. Ammunition velocity, tolerance stacks in firearms, manufacturing of parts, internal/external/terminal ballistics, accuracy, precision, animal physiology, how elk die and on and on is all governed by the math of probability. My choice is to move the boundary conditions as far apart as possible with the tools available which include bullet mass, bullet velocity, bullet construction and firearm proficiency.
One individual in the R&D group at Remington killed a deer in upstate NY many years ago with a rock. He wasn't proud of it but it sure worked. Maybe that's what I need, a backpack full of rocks. He surely proved that only whiny little bitches need firearms.
