Five years ago I was one writer tour of the Leupold and Nosler factories in Oregon. One day of the tour was spent at a range about halfway between Beaverton (Leupold) and Bend (Nosler). The range went out to 1000 yards, and we had a bunch of Nosler rifles with Leupold scopes to try.
One was in the then-new 28 Nosler round, and one of the writers was a sub-editor for one of the hunting magazines, who happened to be a young woman of about average size, but also a fitness fan. She was and avid hunter and had shot quite a bit, but somebody asked her if she wanted to try the 28. She said sure, and lay down behind the bipod-equipped rifle. The scope had been set for 400 yards, so she shot at a 400-yard gong.
She hit the gong but also yelped, then stood up and started rubbing her shoulder, right through the strap-on recoil pad she was wearing. The rifle also had a soft recoil pad, and yet it HURT her--which can happen with women because even if they're avid exercisers, they don't tend to build up muscle in their shoulders like men.
After she'd rubbed the should for a few minutes, she looked at me and said, "Why would anybody want to shoot something like that?"
But as I pointed out earlier, a lot of men are relatively recoil sensitive--but don't have as much sense as that young woman. Back in my own guiding days, one of the outfitter's clients was a good-sized guy, over 6 feet and maybe 190-200 pounds. He'd come to Montana to hunt pronghorn, and because the distance were supposedly so much vaster than where he lived "back East," he didn't bring the .308 he hunted whitetails with.
Instead he bought a new 7mm Remington Magnum--and when we were doing the standard check of the scopes on a 100-yard target, could NOT shoot a group smaller than several inches. In fact, we couldn't tell if the rifle was still sighted-in or not.
Somehow I ended up shooting it, partly to see if something was wrong with the scope. The ammo was factory, and resulted in perfectly adequate 3-shot groups, of maybe 1-1/4 inches. Between us we got the rifle sighted in well enough for him to get a nice goat. But he would have had a lot less trouble with his .308.
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” John Steinbeck
