Terry Wieland On Ammo - The Hunting Rifle – What It Is and What It Ain’t

The classic British double was a pure hunting rifle, even in its most elegant form, like this Holland & Holland Royal.

In 1970, as he neared the end of his career at Outdoor Life, Jack O’Connor wrote a book called simply The Hunting Rifle. Years later, as I ran my eye down the bookshelf, past all the volumes of O’Connor’s work, I found it puzzling that he would devote an entire book to a subject that I thought was rather obvious.

No more.

As the rifle world moves in several directions at once, all of them undesirable, I see exactly what motivated O’Connor to write that book 40 years ago, and wonder what he would think if he could see the stuff being produced now.

Don’t misunderstand. There are some very fine rifles being made today, and not all of them are big-ticket custom jobs. But there are also some real disasters – rifles that are suitable for hunting the way a cow is suitable to run the Kentucky Derby. By and large, today’s so-called hunting rifles are too heavy, too awkward, too lawyer-ed, designed and made by guys who never set foot outside except to walk to their car.

Onto these rifles we are putting scopes that are more suitable for studying the four moons of Jupiter, that have illuminated reticles you could read by, and weigh as much as the rifle itself.

I suppose one could argue that the law of supply and demand dictates what gets made, and if serious hunters wanted good hunting rifles, they would make their desires known and the manufacturers would rush to fill the orders. Personally, I doubt the marketplace is that responsive.

So what is a good hunting rifle? Good question. Basically, it is no different today from it was in O’Connor’s era. It is easier to list the qualities it should have than to simply name the perfect specimen.

The hunting rifle should be light enough to carry comfortably all day, yet heavy enough for steady shooting and to tame the recoil; it should be handy enough for quick response, and to shoot from odd, hurried positions; it should be sufficiently accurate for its purpose at ethical ranges; it should be powerful enough to kill the intended game cleanly even when everything goes wrong, not when everything goes just right. Most of all, no single feature mentioned above should be over-emphasized to the detriment of the other desirable attributes.

Now I would add a couple of specifics: One, it absolutely must have a three-position safety, or a two-position safety that pulls the striker back off the sear and locks the bolt shut. A huge percentage of semi-custom hunting rifles today are based on the Remington 700 action, for which it is possible to get an after-market shroud with such a safety. H-S Precision uses them; they are neither difficult nor expensive. The fact that so many others stick with the execrable two-position Remington safety that allows the bolt to pop open just shows that very few of the manufacturers do any real hunting themselves, or use their own product doing it. What’s worse, there are new actions coming onto the market with the same egregious feature. Don’t any of these guys hunt?

The author in Tanzania in 1990. The rifle is a custom Weatherby in . 257 Weatherby Magnum. The barrel is 26 inches, the scope a Swarovski 6X. It was purely deadly out to 400 yards, yet not too heavy to carry all day.

Push-feed versus controlled feed? It could go either way. There are good ones and bad ones of each type. I prefer the Mauser-type controlled feed, but I’m not a fanatic.

The Winchester 94, while hardly fashionable today, is one of the finest pure hunting rifles ever made – ergonomically excellent, accurate enough and powerful enough out to 200 yards, which is the extreme one would shoot using its iron sights or receiver sight. So this argument is not limited to bolt actions by any means. And, of course, there are the great double rifles. They are nothing but hunting rifles, and superb for their intended purpose.

Into this group you could also lump almost every single-shot mountain rifle ever to come out of England or Central Europe – provided you put a sensible scope on it and not some star-gazer’s wonder designed by an optics engineer who never fired a rifle.

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Now let’s look at what some companies – and some alleged hunters – claim is a good hunting rifle. I know a fellow who owns a 7mm Remington Magnum in a sort of target configuration. Heavy barrel, bulky stock. Fitted on this thing are (a) a bipod, (b) a bulky, heavy, cobra-style sling, and (c) a 6-18x50 riflescope.

It weighs, altogether, about five kilograms. Aside from the weight, all the junk on it makes it uncomfortable to carry for even a short distance, much less all day. It is noisy, with all its extraneous bits clanking against each other. Its owner is an American whitetail deer hunter, but it is a monstrously unsuitable whitetail rifle, and I can think of very few situations in Africa where it would be anything but lousy.

Essentially, the guy has put together a poor man’s sniper rifle to impress the guys down at the range. How impressed they are is another question. Unfortunately, hunting rifles like that one are becoming all too common.

Scope manufacturers, while piously denouncing sniping at game at unethically long ranges, are referring to “the new interest in hunting at long ranges” and convincing people they need a scope the size of a Louisville Slugger. Rifle-buyers insist on shaving the weight of a .30-06 to six pounds max, and then fitting it with a three-pound scope that, for most of its weight and bulk, contributes absolutely nothing to the efficiency and usefulness of the rifle.

The less said about bipods and cobra slings the better. Neither belongs on any big-game rifle, period. The sling is worse than useless, and the bipod hurts more than it helps.

If the owner of this rifle ever got out and walked while hunting, carrying his rifle up and down real mountains, or slung under his chest crawling through the underbrush, he would see how poor it really is. Alas, he doesn’t, and he won’t. Any hunting he does will consist of riding an ATV to a tree stand, and then climbing a ladder.

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Artist and hunter Susan Norris with an early Dakota Model 76 -- possibly the closest thing to the perfect hunting rifle in the author's experience. It handles well, is light enough to carry but heavy enough to shoot well from any position, and the scope is optically excellent yet unobtrusive.

There are practical aspects to a good hunting rifle that never show up on any spec sheet. They only become apparent when you are in the field, with the rifle, hour after hour, carrying it, slinging it on your shoulder, getting in and out of vehicles, loading and unloading it, using it as an alpenstock on steep slopes, or as a balancing pole on others.

Only then do you see how it carries, what sharp edges dig into you, how quiet it is in operation when there could be a kudu around any bush. Only then do you see if it has a comfortable balance point that will allow you to carry it for mile after mile, yet get it into action quickly and quietly.

A few manufacturers say they care about these ergonomic fine points, and a few even produce rifles that suggest they mean what they say. But most rifles are produced by engineers on the one hand who don’t hunt or shoot, dictated to by marketing people who also don’t hunt or shoot. The engineers are in love with things they can measure – accuracy, velocity, energy – and the marketing people love the same things because they can tout über-accuracy and ultra-velocity as big selling points.

Unfortunately, and this is something many hunters today don’t seem to realize, accuracy and velocity, alone or together, do not make a hunting rifle. If they did, we would all be pushing wheelbarrows with benchrest rifles in them, setting up on hilltops, and waiting for that big antelope to emerge a kilometre away.

If there is an African equivalent of the American deer hunter’s Winchester 94 in .30-30, it is either the Mauser 93 in 7x57, or the British Lee-Enfield in .303. Even in a minimally sporterized state, both of those are excellent hunting rifles. They are accurate enough, and powerful enough, for the purpose; they are durable to a fault, easy to carry, and absolutely dependable. Both have shown an astonishing degree of accuracy over the past century in thousand-yard matches, but that’s not really relevant.

When you think of it, there are really very few hunting situations in Africa today that could not be more than adequately handled by a sporterized 7x57, with iron sights, in the hands of a hunter who knows how to stalk and how to shoot under real hunting conditions.

It’s been true for a century, and it’s true now.