Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters A Close-in Deer Rifle

Even in Montana rifles aren't legal everywhere. North of our little town is a 6-square-mile Wildlife Management Area where rifles aren't legal for any hunting. Mostly its whitetails, since it's all riverbottom land. (Yeah, we do have plenty of whitetails in Montana, including some big ones.)

You can use shotguns with slugs, muzzleloaders, and handguns chambered for "traditional" handgun rounds. Have used all three, but for the past few years Eileen has been using a 20-gauge single-shot with a rifled barrel, and the Winchester sabot load with a 240-grain .45-caliber Nosler Partition at a listed 1900 fps. It works very well--which I discovered years ago when hunting whitetails in Iowa before they legalized any sort of rifle round.

Killed a big-bodied buck, which was called an 8-pointer in Iowa, which had a broken front leg due to a poor shot from a handgun hunter with a .44 Magnum revolver. Eventually killed it with a shot at about 50 yards through both shoulders--which exited. It generally groups three into around three inches at 100 yards, and works well to at least 150 yards.