I think you overestimate the need for ultimate speed. Make the first shot properly and it reduces the need for each and every shot that follows.
Exactly!
But in my experience anybody who really practices with a bolt-action can run them just as fast (or faster) that a lever-gun shot by a relative amateur. I know this partly due to taking part in a fast-shooting contest a few years ago, three shots offhand, at three targets placed at 50 yards and the next two closer. The contestants were guides, average hunters, and more than one gun writer. They could use any of a selection of rifles, which included a lever-action .450 Marlin. Many chose the lever. I won with a bolt-action I'd never shot before, in some medium-magnum cartridge I don't recall. I'd bet Phil Shoemaker would have beaten my time with his .458 "Old Ugly."
All you guys are bursting my balloon. From reading, I've thought all this time that bolt-action rifles are only fast in Africa and levers not really useful (except for maybe Teddy and Kermit), whereas in Alaska bolt rifles are slow and lever rifles are faster. Thought maybe 70% of the original Model 71s -- and maybe 90% of the newer Browning and Winchester recreations -- all went to Alaska for make-over into .450s and 500s and so forth. And reading has suggested bolt-actions are only recommended for "hunters" (not the actual guides) -- and the real guides (except for Phil, I guess) always used lever rifles.
Oh, dear. I'm having a paradigm shift! Gak! Now what am I to do??
Learn to run a bolt rifle. Hmmm... what a thought.
OK, so I quoted John for a reason. I can run a smaller-cartridge lever rifle (.44-40 or .44 RM) about 5 times faster than a short-action bolt. That's an educated guess, without benefit of timer, but it's also based on about 25-30-years of CAS competition... where I have actually (but rarely) won some matches from time to time.
(That same competition does indeed highlight some lever-action weaknesses, but usually only over time, and after high round counts. I dunno how many thousands of rounds I've put through a Marlin 1894. I have fewer rounds through the Win 73 repro, no faults discovered yet... but that's with maybe only a thousand rounds or slightly less.)
But then all that said... I haven't tried seriously timing myself with the levers I've usually used for hunting, a .308 BLR 81 in Germany (a little clunky) and a .300 Savage M99 (less so, I think) here in the States. Using dummies with the M99 and with a Rem 700 Ti, and just guessing at whether each shot would have hit the (single) target, it feels like probably 3 times faster... and the M71 seems smoother than both of those others. That "test" (such as it is) also doesn't take recoil into account. (And the smaller competition rifles don't hardly recoil at all.)
And it feels like the .260 bolt is gonna hit me in the eye. I need to get over that.
I'll drag out the M70 and see how that goes...
Luckily I'm not at all serious about the idea of actually shooting a bear if I don't have to. And where we are, the turtles are much more common, anyway... no need for big guns on them!
-Chris
