Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Long range whoppers and other shooting BS

Another timeless classic. “I’m not good on paper but I’m a great game shot.” Or, “I can’t shoot them clay pigeons very good but I’m deadly on live birds.”

"I sight my rifle on deer. I don't have to shoot targets" -- Then a target was set up at 25 yards and he couldn't hit it.

Life is just too short to deal with these people. I just walk away while they're still talking.


Okie John

These are great one reminds me of another incident with shooters.

I was working the public sight in days as a range officer at a small club. They did it a couple Saturdays prior to deer season. Man, it was scary as a range officer to watch some of these guys. I had two guys shooting at the 200 yard gong, resting on the bench rest table on their elbows. They did have a spotting scope. The spotter would call out the miss and they'd make adjustments. Two boxes of ammo into this "sight in" I couldn't take it any longer and suggested they set up a target at 25 yards and get on paper, move to 100 and makes their fine adjustments and then shoot at the 200 yard gong. They looked at me like I was an idiot and very condescendingly informed me they had no intention of shooting a deer at 25 or 100 yards and where they hunted the deer typically showed up on the edge of a field 200 yards from their stand and implied I was a fool for suggesting they zero otherwise. You just cannot argue with logic like that. After three boxes of ammo they had to leave to buy more ammo, complaining the whole time that the guy who bore sighted the rifle must have messed up the scope. They never did hit the gong.

That would be the diplomatic thing to do, but like Ron White, "I had the right to remain silent, I just didn't have the ability."

Guy at work was telling us one day that his uncle shoots game running through the woods at 600 yards with a .22 and other crazy stories. One day one of the fellows has had enough of this BS so he tells the guy I'll stand in the woods at 600 yards and let your uncle take a crack at me. A couple days later the guys say's "I talked to my uncle and he said to tell you you're good as dead". Where do they find them? BCM
Another one was his uncle drives nails in the top of fence posts then walks back to where he can't see them and shoots the heads off of the nails because he remembered where he drove them in at.

I'd been cutting Juniper trees into wood, off a friends ranch, trying to improve his dryland grass a little. I always pack some kind of rifle in the pickup, that day I had a trapdoor Springfield, he drives up about the time I'm done, we get to jawing, both in our 70's so that's a given. It's a little nippy and he offers me a few pulls off the jug. More BS, more pulls off the jug. Out comes the trapdoor. Across the little valley is an old harvester machine, he takes a couple shots, gives up, hands it to me, offhand, wind gusts, wobbling on my feet from whiskey on an empty stomach...I 'thuuunnng' the harvester. I know when to quit and put the trapdoor away. Next day I go back, nobody around, with sandbags, rangefinder, my best ammo, not the stuff rolling around in the glovebox, fired at the harvester. ranged at 780 yards..one hit in 12 shots. Pathetic. But, to this day, he thinks I'm a helluva shot...and I keep forgetting to set the record straight.

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Not quite 780 yards, but I pulled a dinger like that with my Henry carbine last summer. I was just sitting at the bench plunking a gong at 50 with little popgun 32 S&W Long cast subsonics at a buddy's place that I do most of my shooting. Another friend came out a bit later and asked how accurate it was. Told him pretty good up close, he said how about out there? Points out in the field at the 10 incher.

I just pointed one at the moon at the 200 yarder... pop.............. tink. No front or rear rest, just elbows on the stable table.

I could probably launch 1000 shots at that thing like that and never hit it again.... didn't tell him that, though 😂

This is usually what I do when I'm tired of listening to someone on any topic. And then I like to use the Ron Swanson tactic and call them by the wrong name to let them know that I don't care about them. lol

A relative was bragging about a 500+ yard shot at a big mulie with his 6.5-06.

He said he just held on the back and let loose, dropping the deer right there.

I told him his hit was pure luck, because the drop at that range (I know he zeros at 100 yards) was somewhere in the vicinity of 4 feet.

His reply was that the guy who handloads his ammo for him "loads them hot".

Good stories guys, thanks for sharing.

Like mentioned above the “special, hot or my favourite extra stuffed handloads “ are a great indicator of bovid excrement.

I liked the “the .243 is no good on deer under 150 yards as the bullet is moving so fast it does not have time to open up in the deer”

As mentioned above the laser rangefinder and the chronograph broke a lot of hearts and killed a lot of stories.

I have read many rifle reviews. I lose it when. it comes to reporting the range results. A good percentage of them have these comments:

"This best group I got was 1.5 inches (at 100 yards) but I'm sure with some careful development, it'll shoot under an inch."

or...

"The first shot was my fault, as I called it high. The other 4 shots are in a nice grouping., so that's how accurate it shoots." ALL SHOTS COUNT. There are no mulligans. Shoot the group again, THEN make your accuracy assessment.

One more:

"The gun will shoot better than me." Warning! They ALL do. All errors are additive. The rifle has an innate level of precision, then, the shooter adds additional variance-especially in offhand.

Report the actual results, and don't speculate on what might be possible. If you can't shoot with precision, get someone else who can.

The 7 mag gets hit with that line of bull too.

And the .270 Winchester. I heard it more than once when growing up in Montana.

Another consistent brag before laser range-finders appeared was kind of curious. Somehow long shots were almost always 700 yards, whether the animal was a deer killed with a .22-250 or an elk with the 7mm Remington Magnum. Once again, the "hunter" usually claimed he held "just over the back," and WHACK!

One of my friends, who I still keep in contact with, basically claimed that he killed a pronghorn buck at "crazy far" range with his .257 Roberts, by holding on the top of the shoulder. I asked how it was sighted-in, and he said two inches high at 100 yards. Of course, he had no idea of the muzzle velocity, since he didn't own a chronograph--but did mention his handload, which would have gotten 3000-3100 with a 100-grain bullet. Which meant the range was at most 300 yards.

Also knew several guys who claimed to be able to "estimate" range really well, but when I tested their estimates with a Leica rangerfinder they were way off--but did believe the rangefinder until we paced off the range....

I was buying some 130 grain partitions for my .270 at Sportsman's Whorehouse about 15 years ago and the kid behind the counter told me they were no good for deer and I needed to get some all copper Barnes bullets with plastic tips for the high BC. I guess he thought I was gonna put back the partitions, he seemed disappointed when I just said "Uh-huh, ring these up."

Once we were hunting the GW National Forest in western VA in some pretty steep country. We were walking back to the truck on a logging road late in the morning and ran into a couple guys standing at their truck drinking coffee. The big one (I'm talking circumference) was in a talkative mood and told us with the snow on the ground the deer would be easy to see up on the mountainside (which was true in that spot) and he was gonna park it there and pick one off. Said he was good out to past 300.

He was shooting an open-sighted lever action in .35 Remington. There may be guys good to 300 with that set-up but he was not one of 'em.

My LR shootin has always been with P/dogs

Longest lasered dog was ______________yds

with my Savage/Pac Nor 260 AI & 142 SMK's

The old phrase better lucky than good.
That story is the kind of things were Legends are made. Whether it be skill or luck.
And oh yes the MD's 270 maybe that's why I absolutely hate it 270 to this day it's just from the BS you would hear years ago.

When you have a story like that one, you can never, ever, set the record straight!

I'm too old to recall the outlandish stories I was told before I had commode diodes surgically implanted in my ears back in '92. Shoulda wrote them down, huh?

when i was growing up in PENN and pelts were going for good money, me and a friend of mine were in a local gun shop and a guy was telling the owner of the shop about a raccoon he had shot the night before.
He said it weighed a good 15 pounds, and he took it home and skinned it out in his barn. He said it had a good 15 pounds of fat on it, as it was shot near a corn field and had been eating pretty good. Gun shop owner looked at him and said, if it weighed 15 pounds and you scraped 15 pounds of fat off of the pelt, there wouldnt be anything left of the raccoon. Guy got all quiet and walked out