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
For combat against human targets out to 300 yards, I can do anything a Scout rifle can do with a semi-auto and have the advantage of a semi-auto with a high magazine capacity.
The Scout Rifle is a great all arounder, and really has a romantic appeal. And true it can pinch hit as a defensive rifle if it has to. But to actually choose it as a fighting arm over purpose built semi-autos, is fool hearted romanticism; nothing more. The scenarios where the Scout rifle would have the advantage would be on the ragged edge of the exceptions to the rule. Even with rifles, most combat takes place around 35 yards on average. As the distance increases, the chances of engagement goes down exponentially. As distances increase, some of the advantage of a semi-auto begins to decrease as well; but you have to get into the realms of the �exceptions� where the semi-auto no longer has the advantage.
Now, with that said. If I were hunting somewhere in the world where safety could potentially be an iffy thing, a Scout rifle would be awfully hard to beat. As a general light weight rifle for hunting or wilderness survival with only a small to moderate human vs. human threat level; again, the Scout would be idea. But you don�t exactly see many people toting a Scout rifle into a combat zone; there�s a reason for that, and it�s the same reason soldiers, for the most part, haven�t carried bolt guns since WWII.
