Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 10 Most Underrated Cartridges

I, personally, will identify as a 219 DW.

I go to church with a girl whose husband outfitted her with a big 3 1/2" 12 gauge of some variety with a tight choke and she couldn't hit a turkey with it. She isn't large, I would guess about 130 pounds. The old taxidermist who sometimes guided her and called turkeys advised her to try a 20 gauge and she took that advice and right away started killing turkeys with it. She deer hunts with a 7mm STW and does real well with it but I think her husband or son sight it in and she only shoots it at deer 3 or 4 times a year.

Well, yeah!

If I recall correctly I've owned at least half-a-dozen .300 Savages, including at least two take-down Savage 99's and a 722 Remington--and used them enough to know the .300 works as well as the .308 Winchester.

But that has nothing to do with whether the .300 is considered "underrated." As mentioned earlier, I think very few people care much (if at all) about "rating" the .300 Savage these days.

And how can any cartridge be underrated if very few people even think about the cartridge anymore? This is because ithe ,300 Savage is almost never chambered in new rifles (except in a "limited-run" to sell to geezers, which obviously includes me). Plus, factory ammo keeps getting harder to find--because there aren't enough geezers still around who want to buy any.

All of these discussions (including those that keep bashing the 6.5 Creedmoor) are primarily due to all of the "real" rifle loonies on the Campfire being handloaders--and hence assuming that every other hunter in the known universe (meaning their friends) is a handloader as well.

But over 90% of hunters in the U.S. don't handload, and never have. Why would they buy a rifle in a chambering for which factory ammo is becoming less and less available? And why would they ever bother wondering if that unavailable cartridge is "underrated"?

I like my Remington 700 Classic in 300 Savage quite a bit for reasons both technical and not. If good brass gets scarce I'll simply have to invest in a set of forming dies and I'm sure the base material 308 Winchester brass will always be around. I've been deriving satisfaction from handloading for 40+ years and I'm not likely to stop.

40+ years! You must be a semi-geezer.

Handloaded my first round (a 7.62x54 Mosin-Nagant) 57 years ago, using a Lee Loader--the "hammer" model. The next year I also started loading 20 and 12-gauge shotshells will Lee Loaders. Used the powder "dippers" in the LL kits for a while, but pretty soon bought a Pacific oil-dampened scale. All of this was with paper-route or summer-job money.

Bought my first metallic-cartridge press (from Herter's) in 1973, along with a set of .243 Winchester dies. The press worked fine, but the dies didn't. Later learned a lot of Herter's dies were "seconds" from another company.

Guess I am indeed finally getting "mature"!

Spot on!!!!!

I'll be 56 this year.

In 1977-78 I was putting together my own 12 gauge shells with a Lee machine, and 357 mags with the same RCBS Rockchucker press I have today. Not long thereafter I was assembling Dad's rifle ammunition for the deer hunting trips he got as a result of his work. That was my first exposure to one of the "loads that work", namely 52 grains of 4064 in a 30-06 under a 150 grain bullet.

Here's a negative about being a (semi-) geezer outside of the usual age related complaints. I remember being able to buy top quality brown spirits before that became a hot and trendy market category flooded with buyers who seemingly have more money than sense.

You youngsters need to brush up your experience portfolio. Loaded any brass shotgun shells with Lord Black lately?

Nah, I was born in the twentieth century.

That’s too bad. They were the norm prior to WW2, and are easy as heck to reload. They might even smell better than paper hulls.