Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 200 yard centerfire pinker ?

Ruger American ranch is a fun plinking rifle.

Tikka or a CZ 527 in 223 as suggested would be to very good options. Might need to even out the barrel channel on the CZ but that only takes a few minutes for the three I have played with. Set trigger on those CZ's can be a blast at the range.

I agree that anything but a .223 would be nuts, but I find myself reaching for a Howa Mini in 6.5 Grendel quite often lately. Suitably stocked and scoped, it excels in the OP's desired circumstances.

It is not hard to find centrefires which would fill the bill, but if you want to make it a bit more interesting why not go with a good accurate .22 LR? There's quite a few which will group under 1/2" at 50 yards, but extrapolating that to 200 will really put a premium on your wind-reading ability, and be good fun.

Fast-twist .223.

There are others but I use a 270 or 243. The 270 gets 120 or 130 grain bullets under a reduced charge of h4895

I am with mjbgalt. Have been plinking with my 270 Win using reduced loads of H4895. Trail Boss is very good also.

Yep, need them heavies for 200 for sure

On the other hand I would never buy a slow twist 223 just because that is dumb

Anyone not mentioning a Cooper 21, hasn’t shot one.

Needed, no. Good idea, yup. Besides the obvious advantage in the wind, there’s no downside at .223 velocities like there can be with fast-movers and some varmint bullets. Besides, there’s a very good chance the OP will decide to branch out to something else, longer ranges being the most likely.

My .223s are mere 1-9” Rugers, but I have a couple twisty 6s if I want to go long.

Couple more possibilities, 221 Fireball or 6mmBR.

OTOH, a 10” twist in the .300 BO works fine on cast bullets up to at least 230 gr. And a 14” twist w/55 gr FMJ has killed tons of critters, 2 & 4 legged.

Right.

I have,
Tikka varmint in 223 With 8 twist
Cooper 223 with 12 twist
Remington 700 police with 9 twist
White Oak SDM 8 twist.
All very capable of sub MOA @ 200

I bought a Tikka .223 Varmint for exactly that purpose. Our club has a summer league called the Belly Shoot. It's 20rds prone at 200yds with a bipod. I put a Leupold VX3i 4.5-14x40 on it and am happy with the results.

A 30 cal semiautomatic with cast gas checked bullets. Most fun I've ever had with a 308 win

You can shoot all day and not worry about barrel life. 37.0 grs IMR-4895 pushing a gas checked 180gr round nose shot lights out and was much more pleasant than full power stuff. Velocities were 2300 fps and no leading

I didn't know that some AR's could shoot less than MOA @ 200 yards! Would you name a couple of models?
Thanks in advance,

Less than moa is pretty easy to do, especially when most guys are talking 3 and 5 shot groups. Mine do that with 10 shots. One of the best ones I've found is from a company you don't hear much about, but they've been in the business for a long time: Windham weaponry. Look into the varmint exterminator. It will easily shoot 1 moa at 200 yards. Keep in mind 1 moa is 2.094" groups at 200 yards. Here's how my rifles with the Windham weaponry varmint exterminator barrel does at 100 yards:


Not just one cherry picked group^^

White oak armament (WOA) is also a good source for accurate barrels for an AR:



Noveske is also top tier when it comes to AR's.

If a guy wanted to play around with an AR10, I'd get one in 6.5 creedmoor:



I also have some 500 yard targets that are sub moa, but don't want to bore you with the details... There are other rifles and barrel manufactures that I can add to the list, but need to head out right now.. Hopefully that helps...

Thanks for the tip, and that's great shooting!