You are assuming the fight will be at close range and that you'll have lots of ammo. Worst of all, you assume you can move to different cover and shoot well enough at the same time to keep his head down. All he has to do is wait until you empty your rifle and try to reload. Then you are dead. Or he can shoot and move, letting you waste your ammo where he was.
The trouble with these set piece scenaros is that they assume the fight will be in a selected location, at a range they assume and go like they think.
They are often different than what we assume.
The Scout rifle is just an all around rifle with some special features. Jeff Cooper also wrote that a guy armed with a basic sporter and a basic hunting scope, like a 4X, will also do very well. The Scout Rifle was basically a test bed for ideas to make the basic rifle more user friendly.
BTW, he learned that variable scopes were quite vulnerable to breakdowns from experience. Something others who shoot alot have also found. E
