Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Long Range Hunting Need Long range s/a Varmint thumper help

Brand loyalty is a funny thing isn't it? This whole discussion got started 'cause a couple of guys can't acknowledge that a model line from their beloved favored manufacturer can and does, occasionally (about 20-30% of the time) fail when used under very demanding conditions, far different than a typical hunter ever puts them through. Formidilosus and others didn't bash all Leupold products. Quite the opposite, commented favorably on Leupold products he had observed to be reliable (fixed x Mark 4s, for example), criticizing only those he had observed were more prone to failure.

I've noticed that when folks hear of something they haven't experienced themselves, they tend to discount it. I do the same thing to a certain extent, thinking "Huh... That's never happened to me... Guess I'll hang with my brand x until it I see it fail myself." Not here though. We go waaaayyy beyond that. In this thread, and many others like it, the prevailing thought seems to be, "I shoot products from that same manufacturer and they have never failed me. By God, if the product I'm using fails on someone else, they are making that crap up and everything they say about anything is a lie."

I guess it's human nature to defend your own choices, but dang... Just because it hasn't happened to me, doesn't mean it can't happen to someone else, and surely doesn't mean it won't happen to me in the future.

Not many folks have the opportunity to line up several brands and models of scopes, and twist the heck out of the turrets for hours on end on all sorts of different rifles and actually observe how the various products hold up in statistically meaningful numbers. When I run across someone that does this sort of thing for a living, I'm gonna listen what he has to say, especially when its verified by similar observations from a bunch of others...

John