Talkin' rifles in Ohio or Pennsylvania is bound to draw some hilarious comments.
I resemble that remark, being raised a Buckeye. There is truth there. I now hunt exclusively in KY, and let me tell you that there is a world of difference. Your general run-of-the-barbershop old fart Buckeye spent most of his life lobbing shotguns slugs at deer. What he knows about centerfire rifles comes reading Outdoor Life, 3rd hand sources or military experience. I was that way. Luckily, I had some really old-old farts around me that worshipped 30-06 Springfield, and so I did not have that bad of an education.
I'm going to address this problem from that of an unedumacated Buckeye. Given something like 7X57, the first response is going to be to judge it against 30-06 or 300 WIN MAG. Ought-Six is proper deer medicine. It "kills everything on the North American Continent" . 300 WIN MAG is something magic that take care of the biggest bears, and the most distant elk. Everything else is crap that some swarmy little ferner designed to kill other little swarmy ferners and it wasn't going to kill big Germans and Americans-- for that you need at least a 30-something. From there you'll start getting stuff about how some chamberings pick up speed out past 300 yards. You get the idea.
From this standpoint, a 7mm-something just isn't in the same ballpark as a 30-something.
There is another aspect to this, and I saw it the first time someone brought a 260 REM to a neighbor's deer camp I was visiting. These were not Kentucky natives. These were all Buckeyes and Back-Easters. Everyone got a chance to shoot it and there really was no appreciable recoil. The reaction was one of admiration that quickly turned to loathing. That was cheating somehow. If it didn't bruise your shoulder, it wasn't going to do much to the deer. Everyone in that camp had either driven or flown to KY to get their shoulders bruised properly, and they were not going to brook any interference.
