Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2020 i RifleShooter

Chances are, when somebody’s talking about a traditional full-length tubular magazine lever gun, your mental picture of it will be a top-ejecting Winchester Model 94 or a side-ejecting Marlin 336. Both pretty much define “.30-30 carbine.” But in the case of Marlin’s 336 platform, it may not be a .30-30. Or a carbine. Or, for that matter, sporting a full-length magazine. One choice example fell into my hands recently. It belongs to a friend and Marlin fanatic Doug Fee, whose incurable auction addiction occasionally pays big dividends. This time it certainly did at an obscenely reasonable “gavel price.” Made in 1950, it’s a two-third-length magazine, 24-inch-barreled Model 336A in .35 Rem. Since the 336 was introduced in 1948 as an updated descendent of the legendary Model 1893, it’s been offered…

Leadership in the manufacture of accurate rifles designed for competitive shooting has changed only a couple of times during the past 85 years or so. Beginning during the mid-1930s and reaching into the late 1950s, the Winchester Model 70 National Match with optional light, medium and heavy barrels in .30-06 reigned supreme across America and a few other countries. If being top shooter in the Wimbledon Cup match at Camp Perry was on your bucket list, the Model 70 Bull Gun with an extremely heavy, 28-inch barrel in .300 H&H Mag. was just the ticket for keeping bullets close together on a 1,000-yard target. If competing with the .22 Long Rifle was your cup of tea, the Winchester Model 52 was offered with both standard and heavy barrels with Redfield…

The shooting world has had its collective eye on the .350 Legend cartridge since the round was first announced to the general public at last year’s SHOT Show. Shooters were intrigued by the .350 Legend, a brand-new cartridge with an ostentatious name built from the ground up to meet the specific needs of deer hunters living in straight wall-only states. One man who had particular interest in Winchester’s new wünderkind cartridge was Bill Wilson of Wilson Combat. Wilson will always be best known for his 1911 pistols, but over the years he has lent his engineering eye to refining everything from big-bore revolvers to defensive shotguns and ARs. Though Wilson came a bit late to the AR game, his rifles quickly gained a reputation for reliability and accuracy. Wilson Combat…

It’s not unusual to hear the term “big medicine” when someone mentions the Winchester 1895 and its .405 Win. cartridge, but that’s not how President Teddy Roosevelt actually referred to the gun he used extensively on his African safari. Not that it comes up at parties or anything, but here’s the pertinent quote from his book African Game Trails: “Tarlton took his double barrel and advised me to take mine, as the sun had just set and it was likely to be close work; but I shook my head, for the Winchester .405 is, at least for me personally, the ‘medicine gun’ for lions.” “Big” or not, the .405 Win. was the most powerful lever-action cartridge of its day, making the Model 1895 Winchester the king of the lever-gun hill.…

A few years ago I had the opportunity to tour the home and office of the late Col. Jeff Cooper. My primary takeaway from the visit was that the colonel was a man who studied his craft. The library in his Arizona home must contain nearly every book on combat published since The Art of War. Cooper’s practical knowledge and in-depth research helped make him one of the world’s leading experts on the topic of personal defense. Not surprisingly, he was very particular in his choice of guns. Perhaps the best known of Colonel Cooper’s firearms designs is the scout-rifle concept. Built to serve in hunting and personal defense roles, the scout rifle developed a niche following after he introduced it to the world in the early 1980s. In 1983…

What’s the first thing almost everyone does when they buy a Ruger 10/22? Start customizing it, especially if you plan to use the rifle for a special task like competition. There are plenty of companies out there ready to sell you the components to maximize your 10/22’s potential, and for years Ruger left at least some money on the table by not selling purpose-built rifles with features advanced shooters want. That’s changed in recent times, and the new 10/22 Competition is a good example. The rifle comes from Ruger’s relatively young Custom Shop, and the Green Mountain laminate-stock version I tested has a lot of the features competitors look for. Right off you notice the proprietary stock, built in Ruger’s New Hampshire facility. It’s a skeletonized laminate, with the large…

“There is no finer 22 rimfire than a Ruger 10/22 autoloading carbine….Its smooth, handsome finishes, racy lines, perfect balance and superb accuracy make this new Ruger an approach to perfection.” So read the marketing copy surrounding the introduction of a gun that would become the biggest-selling rimfire of all time. Half a century after its debut, Ruger estimates it has sold 7 million 10/22s. It’s not like the 10/22 was the first semiauto rimfire. Manufacturers like Browning, Winchester and Savage had developed and sold such guns since the early 20th century. Aside from a few other aspects I’ll get to in a minute, what really set the Ruger apart was its patented 10-round rotary magazine. As the story goes, Bill Ruger’s first gun project was a semiauto version of the…

An old accuracy adage pinpoints the importance of quality in the “Three Bs”—barrel, bullets and brass—when searching for ultimate precision. Hornady’s new Precision Measurement Station can’t do anything about the first, but it sure can help handloaders determine whether quality in bullets and brass is present. This instrument does not fix problems. It finds them. It helps the hand-loader sort projectiles and cartridges for dimensional consistency and in some cases determines exactly where corrective action is called for. Hornady was kind enough to send me an early-production sample for review. It’s an impressive unit right out of the box. Weighing in at eight pounds, it’s got enough inherent weight to be nice and solid on the bench, and leveling feet enable the user to optimize positioning and stability. Additionally, those…

Please forgive me, but I love fast, powerful magnums, at least for some applications. On the other hand, I also like accuracy and efficiency, and I don’t enjoy getting kicked into next week unless there’s a valid reason. There are many great non-magnum cartridges in most bore/bullet diameters that do almost anything most of us need done. But before we try to sort through the best of them, maybe we should define “magnum.” It comes from a French word for an extra-large bottle of champagne and, since the 1880s, has been frequently used to denote cartridges that are fast, powerful or have extra-large cases. The British gun trade first used “magnum” as a cartridge suffix. Their strict interpretation was: A cartridge that was larger, faster and/or more powerful than a…

Twenty years ago, suppressors were a rarity in the civilian shooting world. The legal challenge of owning a suppressor made them unattractive to most shooters, and few if any major manufacturers produced them. Today, suppressors seem to be everywhere. Competitive rifle shooters, defense-minded individuals and hunters can be seen with these sound-reduction devices attached to their firearms. As great as they are, suppressors have a problem. They can control the muzzle blast and report of a rifle cartridge, but they can do nothing to mitigate the crack associated with a bullet passing through the sound barrier. Technology can’t trump physics. The solution is to slow down the bullet below the supersonic threshold. That is easier said than done, especially when you don’t want to sacrifice terminal performance. Ammunition manufacturers have…

Sometimes it takes hands-on experience to wake you up to how cool a rifle is. When I first got the KelTec CMR30, which we were planning to use on this season’s “Handguns & Defensive Weapons” on Sportsman Channel, I wasn’t all that impressed. I opened the box to find a small, squat black rifle. Big deal. When I began really looking at it, though, I was surprised to learn the .22 Mag. semiautomatic had a 16-inch barrel, which certainly doesn’t look like it could be that long. It took me a minute to figure out how to operate the telescoping stock (why cheat and read the manual?) But then I found the latch in front of the trigger guard that releases skeleton-type stock, which can lock in several different positions.…