Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters JOC 50 years later

I suspect O'Connor would have really liked the 6.5 Creedmoor, and here's why: He had a great feel for the "average hunter." In fact he wrote about this specifically in The Last Book: Confessions of a Gun Editor"--though he applied it primarily to the head editors of the various magazines he worked for.

Which is exactly why he liked the .270 Winchester (though not as much as the .30-06). He firmly believed the average hunter shot more accurately with a lighter-recoiling rifle, which was even more true then than it is today--because back then most commercial hunting rifles had steel or hard plastic/rubber buttplates.

Her also knew, from long experience, that bullet PLACEMENT is by far the most important factor in "killing power" on big game--as long as the bullet penetrates and expands sufficiently. He grasped the virtues of the Nosler Partition almost immediately after it appear in 1948, when other gun writers (especially Elmer Keith) never really did--evidenced by Elmer using really poor bullets in his .333 OKH on his first African safari m in 1958, 300-grain steel-jacketed softpoints that sometimes didn't even exit from 50-pound Thompson gazelles. As a result, Keith ended up using solid 300-grain .333s for the rest of the safari--which did not kill quickly on anything, which is largely where the myth of African plains game being super-tough became common in America. Keith would have done much better by using 180-grain Partitions in the .30-06.

I was given the same advice about writing for the average guy by one of my writing mentors, another very successful outdoor writer, who didn't write about guns but fishing and all-around hunting. I found him to be absolutely right--which is why I suspect Jack O'Connor would have liked the 6.5 Creedmoor: The light recoil allows the average hunter to place bullets well, and factory ammo is not only very accurate but available in a wide variety of excellent hunting bullets--and O'Connor also knew the average guy did not handload.

Whether he would have liked the available 6.5 Creedmoor factory rifles is another question, but my first 6.5 Creedmoor was a walnut-stocked Ruger Hawkeye that fit right in with hisideas of a classic rifle. I suspect he would have also liked the 3-position safety, controlled-feed action, and simple trigger as well.

But the major point is that Jack O'Connor, unlike Elmer Keith or Charles Askins Jr. or many other "experts" of the same period, could empathize with the average hunter, and thus write far more appealing hunting stories or technical articles. In fact Charles Askins Sr. had the same gift, which is why I enjoy reading his writing far more than his son's.

Obviously, O'Connor's education as a writer helped a lot, partly because he also taught writing. The major factor in teaching other people to write is not correcting spelling or grammar, but improving the ability to self-edit, increasing the ability of how any writer communicates with readers.

While all writers need editors to correct typos and other mistakes, the ability to self-edit helps enormously, one reason Jack O'Connor stood out from his contemporaries.