Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2021 i RifleShooter

He Thinks We Get It I just wanted to let you know you are one of very few gun magazines that get it. Most current publications seem to be obsessed with shooting people, and I am sick of it. I know full well the 2nd Amendment is not about hunting, and I own many self-defense guns and practice self-defense drills, but the fact is there are many other positive things that happen with firearms! Every weekend, thousands of folks gather at ranges and compete in competitions. Every day, friends and families are making priceless memories while plinking. All fall, winter and spring, age-old traditions are followed in hunting camps and blinds. This culture that surrounds using guns for recreation is full of values that are worthy of admiration. Thank you…

Ruger Magpul X-22 Backpacker Part of the family of Takedown 10/22s, the X-22 Backpacker features a Magpul stock with a hinged storage compartment in the buttstock that’s capable of holding three spare 10-round mags. The setup also allows you to lock the stainless barrel and fore-end to the stock when broken down—making it easy to stash in a pack or vehicle. The stock features a non-slip rubber buttpad and storage in the grip. The rifle comes with a combination scope base adapter for both Weaver-style and .22 tip-off mounts, and sights include an adjustable fiber-optic rear and fiber-optic front. $529, RUGER.COM Rival Arms ST-3X This new buttstock is designed to fit chassis with AR, buffer-style tubes, and it provides comb height and length-of-pull adjustment. The cheek pad is reversible, and…

Savage Arms is under new ownership, and as with any changing of the guard at a major firearm manufacturer, there’s a period of uncertainty when the shooting public waits to see in which direction the new bosses take the brand. With the launch of the new 110 Ultralite carbon-fiber barrel hunting rifle, it’s clear Savage’s new leadership is planning to take this company to the top—to the top of the market, but also to the top of a ridge where a bull elk is bugling and to the top of a shale slide with a 40-inch ram on the other side. That’s because the newest addition to the 110 line is also the lightest 110 available, the sub-six pound Ultralite. As the name implies, this new rifle uses the same…

During the 600 or so years of the common use of blackpowder as a propellant in firearms, velocity rarely came close to reaching 2,000 fps. In the United States velocity peaked during the late 1800s with the introduction of metallic cartridges of American design such as the .45-125 Sharps and .50-140 Win., both intended for single-shot rifles. Maximum bullet speed was still only about 1,500 fps. The only ways hunters had to increase killing power on bison and other large game was to increase bullet diameter and weight, and in the case of the Winchester cartridge, it was 700 grains. Moving to smaller targets, the maximum velocity of America’s favorite deer cartridge, the .44-40 Win. loaded with a 200-grain bullet, was around 1,200 fps. Extremes in both bullet weight and…

Years ago I wrote an article for Guns & Ammo about the role the Henry rifle played in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, a 1,912-mile steel-ribboned link that joined the civilized East with the untamed West. It was a massive undertaking that began in 1862 and—after an interruption due to the Civil War—ended in 1869, thus making it possible to traverse the country over a period of weeks rather than months. To accomplish this historic feat, two newly formed railroad companies were created: the Central Pacific, which started out from Sacramento, California, laying track to the east; and the Union Pacific, which began putting down rails at Omaha, Nebraska, heading west. On May 10, 1869, near what is now Promontory Point, Utah, they finally met. Although the Central Pacific…

Yeah, I know I’m supposed to know everything about sporting rifles. I acquired a nice 1899 takedown in .250 Savage from my buddy Joe Bishop’s widow—clean, in great shape, flip-up aperture. Between my eyesight and the irons, I’ll never know how well it really shoots, but it grouped just fine with 100-grain Hornady InterLocks. Thing is, I wanted to use it on the Central Coast, but there are no California-legal unleaded factory loads in .250. I have dies, so I loaded a few 90-grain GMX, but if the bullets hit paper at all, they hit sideways. I should have known that before 1920 all .250 Savage rifles were barreled with a slow 1:14 twist for the initial 87-grain load. My friend Kyler Hamman directed me to Hammer Bullets in Idaho,…

I’ve got a question. If you owned, say, a Remington 700, Winchester Model 70, Ruger American or any other conventional bolt-action rifle, whether foreign or domestic, and you were offered to somehow have that rifle magically converted to where you could cycle the action with a simple pull/push of the bolt handle, would you go for it? I’m talking a rifle that would cycle with half the motions, twice the speed, one that imbues the ability to reload for a follow-up shot without having to lower the rifle from the shoulder—which is what most hunters do. Sound good? Apparently not, because while hunters in Europe and the rest of the world have embraced the straight-pull rifle with open arms, not a single American firearms manufacturer other than Browning has been…

In 2016, at the height of the budget bolt-action rifle wars, Thompson/Center released its $400 Compass rifle. The original Compass was, for the most part, a good gun that featured a three-lug bolt and a 5R rifled barrel. But it had an Achilles’ heel: the trigger. The trigger in the first-gen Compass rifle wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good, either. To their credit, the folks at Thompson/Center understood they had a well-built rifle with one major issue. In short order, T/C decided to improve on the original trigger design, and the Compass II was born. The Generation II T/C trigger is a significant improvement over the previous Compass trigger. The Gen II model features a bladed design and breaks between three and four pounds. The test rifle’s trigger averaged 3.4…

The No. 5 Enfield in .303 British is almost the perfect bolt-action rifle. For once designers delivered a rifle with the right weight, length, balance and power for almost any task a World War II infantryman might encounter. But the No. 5 came too late because the bolt action itself was already obsolete, and two serious flaws consigned it to the scrap bin. For one, its zero sometimes wandered inexplicably, and while the short rifle that was perfectly capable in the jungles of Southeast Asia, it lacked the longer range performance the Western Front of Europe demanded. Since the self-loading rifle was ascendant and fixes for the No. 5 were too slippery—not to mention plenty of No. 4 rifles still in inventory—it was scrapped in 1947 and the old, tried-and-true…

Springfield’s new 2020 Way-point bolt-action rifle is one of the best of the new breed of ultralight precision rifles. It offers modern ergonomics coupled with extraordinary precision at a price well below that of most competing models. Yep, you read that right. The Waypoint is a bolt-action rifle, as far as I know the first bolt action manufactured under the Springfield Armory name since the Model 1903 was discontinued in 1949. History buffs will rightly point out that the Springfield Armory of today is an altogether different company than the U.S. military armory of yore, which manufactured the bulk of our nation’s service rifles from 1777 until 1968. That’s true. However, a very cool parallel may be drawn between the historic company and the modern one Both built rifles of…

The X-Bolt has been Browning’s flagship bolt-action centerfire for more than a dozen years now, and in that time it has been produced in a dizzying array of variants—from relatively plain Jane synthetic-stocked models to classy, high-grade wood models to the feature-packed Hell’s Canyon series to rifles specifically built for long range. The X-Bolt Western Hunter kinda falls in the middle, a workhorse rifle with just the right frills for certain types of hunters. Browning does things a little differently from other gun companies, and the Western Hunter is what the company calls a “SHOT Show special.” This means it’s a limited-production model. However, each year some of these SHOT Show specials make it into the regular-production catalog, and the Western Hunter is a strong candidate to do exactly that.…

Bill Wilson, a world-champion competitive shooter, has a long history of working with other accomplished people in designing firearms. One of those people is Paul Howe. Howe spent 20 years in the U.S. Army, 10 of those in Special Operations, and retired as a sergeant major. Howe was a sergeant first class in Delta Force in Mogadishu in 1993 during the “Black Hawk Down” incident and has collaborated with Wilson Combat on several projects. The latest is the Wilson Combat Paul Howe 6.5 Creedmoor Tactical Carbine. This rifle is based on the AR-10 pattern, but instead of .308, it is chambered in perhaps the most successful rifle cartridge introduced in the past 50 years: the 6.5 Creedmoor. Based on the .30 TC cartridge, it fires lighter bullets with better ballistic…

Any time you can shoot a semiautomatic rimfire with a 25-round magazine, well, that’s just fun. This is what you get with the Mossberg Blaze-47, an AK-47 lookalike that can find a permanent place in your gun rack for just $370. The Blaze-47 is available with a traditional wood stock or a flat dark earth polymer stock. The AK-47 Blaze feeds from either 10- or 25-round magazines. My FDE polymer-stocked model shipped with the latter. Checking in at 4.5 pounds, it’s light but feels good in the hands. The buttstock is a six-position adjustable. Length of pull is 12.25 inches with it pushed all the way in; the midpoint is the common 13.5 inches, and all the way out it’s 15.5 inches. It’s easily adjustable via a locking device on…