Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2022 i RifleShooter

Ruger’s First Marlin Nice to see Ruger bring back the Marlin 1895 in .45-70. I’m sure it is a great rifle, but at $1,400, stainless steel with cowboy loop, barrel with threads for silencer, crossbolt safety, AR-15 sight rail and laminated stock—not for me. What happened to blue steel, walnut stock, normal lever, barrel-mounted sights, drilled and tapped for scope mount if wanted and a price that doesn’t require a bank loan. Any chance Ruger will bring out a more realistic version ? Think I will just keep hunting with my smooth-as-butter 1960s Marlin. B. O’Neil, Tennessee Mr. O’Neil: Yes, you can expect blued, walnut guns with “normal” levers to be forthcoming. As mentioned in the article, Ruger started with this version because it was the biggest seller under the…

Made in the U.S. by Long Shot Precision, the Adjustable Bag Rider (ABR) is a narrow, smooth shoe that mounts to the toe of your stock, parallel to your bore, and rides in the notch of a rear sandbag. This enables interference-free, straight-line recoil and maximizes shot-to-shot consistency. The lower half of the ABR is mounted to the upper half via dual hardened steel dowels that slide in linear bearings. It’s controlled by a thumb wheel that allows extremely precise height adjustments. When combined, the consistent, straight recoil characteristics and the super-fine height adjustments make the ABR a valuable tool for extreme-range shooting. Extreme long range shooter James Stephens won the Thunder Valley Precision ELR match with an ABR, and he credits his consistency to the device. It’s ideal for…

In the late 1940s, John Nosler went on a moose hunt in British Columbia that went terribly wrong. The cause of the grief was bad bullets, but rather than carp to the man behind the sporting goods counter, Nosler decided instead to build a better bullet. That’s how the Nosler Partition came to pass. Its development seemed to set an ethos for Nosler products going into the future: Good simply isn’t good enough. That same principle can be applied to Nosler’s new flflagship bolt-action riflfle, the Model 21. Nosler thought it could improve upon existing riflfle designs and create a gun that offffered custom components and accuracy at a production-riflfle price. In doing so, it may have done what the Partition did to hunting bullets: Set a new standard of…

Springfield’s new Saint Edge ATC Elite AR-15 is designed for one purpose: maximizing accuracy and consistency. It’s heavy. It’s a tad bulky. But from the second you pick one up, you know it’s different. This is not your lightweight, casual AR-type plinker. It’s a specialist. Most noticeably, what makes it different from the run-of-the-mill AR-15s is the monolithic lower receiver and hand-guard, which are machined as one piece. This is the ATC element, which is an acronym for Accurized Tactical Chassis. Incorporating the fore-end with the lower receiver eliminated several elements that sometimes plague typical AR-15s. There’s no flex between the lower receiver, which is what the buttstock mounts to, and the handguard/fore-end. As a result, the ATC eliminates potential inconsistencies when shooting prone over a bipod or bracing against…

By the end of the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt was an American hero with his sights set on the highest seat in government. Despite Roosevelt’s acclaim as a leader during the conflict, there was one area where he saw room for improvement: marksmanship. America hadn’t been embroiled in a significant armed conflict since the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution and urbanization meant that far fewer soldiers had grown up shooting to supply their families with meat. In 1903, partly at Roosevelt’s behest, congress created the office of Director of Civilian Marksmanship as part of the War Department Appropriations Act. The National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, which would later become the Civilian Marksmanship Program, was established. Roosevelt had seen firsthand how Spanish soldiers firing 7mm Mauser bolt-action…

On a hunt on Kodiak Island last year, I experienced a case-head separation. I discovered the problem when I took the opportunity to try to shoot a red fox at 250 yards with the .338 Rem. Ultra Mag I was carrying. I missed with the first shot, and extraction was stiff, but I thought nothing of it since ice was caked on the rifle. I dropped the fox with the third shot. Examining the three soot-blackened cartridge cases, I discovered two were ruptured nearly all the way around the case head, about a half-inch up from the rim. Clearly there was a problem, and having suspect handloads on Kodiak Island, where brown bear encounters are common, is not a good thing. When I got home I began my research. I…

It was Saturday morning, the second week of Kansas rifle season. Buck movement was tapering off, but I wasn’t worried because most hunters had filled their tags. Except for Tim Baugh. He was using open sights, which is not much different from bowhunting in our thick timber, where darkness stays late and comes early. He was on a stand that hadn’t produced, but it should have. Tim had seen bucks, so I encouraged him to hold his ground. A shot nearly jolted me out of my own stand. I was pretty sure it was Tim, and indeed it was. He’d taken a fine buck cleanly with an old Mannlicher-Schoenauer, complete with full stock, rotary magazine and butter-knife bolt handle—and chambered to 6.5x54 MS. I’m always curious to see what rifles…

With the winds of World War II blowing across the European continent, U.S. military leaders began to consider the adoption of a new defensive rifle. A study of the Blitzkrieg tactics of the Germans revealed that the use of fast-moving tanks and other armor could suddenly expose support personnel such as clerks, cooks and mechanics to combat. The answer for them as well as frontline officers, machine gun crewmen and others was an autoloading rifle that was considerably lighter and more compact than the M1 Garand. The Colt 1911 pistol had largely served that role during World War I, but its effective range had proven to be severely limited in the hands of thousands of soldiers who had no previous experience and limited military training with handguns. The new lightweight…

In 1861, Charles H. Ballard, designer and chief machinist at Ball & Williams, a firm in which he was once a partner, began offering the new Ballard rifle chambered in the .38 rimfire cartridge. As the Civil War ramped up, the firm soon sought military contracts. The little gun made a dandy cavalry carbine and was easily up-calibered to .44 Henry rimfire, .46 rimfire or .56-56 Spencer rimfire. The Ballard served ably during the Civil War—most famously with the state of Kentucky. One unusual feature added near war’s end was a dual ignition system featuring a percussion nipple below the rimfire firing pin. Once fired, the shooter could pierce the center of the case and charge the Ballard as a breech or muzzleloader, with the spent case sealing the chamber…

Some companies are resistant to change. They offer the same old models, perhaps with some aesthetic tweaks, year after year. That’s not always a bad thing, but it certainly doesn’t drive innovation. CZ USA is not one of those companies. Every year, CZ changes its firearms lineup, adding models and making changes to existing products. For 2022, CZ went back to the drawing board and delivered the CZ 600, an all-new centerfire bolt-action rifle. The CZ 600 is a modern rifle with several notable features that help it stand out from the crowd. CZ, and its predecessor Zbrojovka Brno, has been producing bolt-action rifles for nearly a century. Its pre-World War II VZ.33 has long been considered one of the most-desirable Mauser rifles ever, and the 550 series big bore…

Quite a few years back, Townsend Whelen said, “Only accurate rifles are interesting.” I’m thinking that if he were alive today would that “only” be a touch too much, considering all the accurate rifles on the market today—especially when it comes to the more modern rimfire rifles being produced by a number of manufacturers. One of these newer arrivals is the Savage A22 Precision Lite. Strong as a tank, sleek as a Corvette and accurate as all get out, this rimfire rifle might just be the firearm you need for hitting the competition circuit or even rugged outdoor hunting duties. Built on the famed A22 action, this model has been upgraded and lightened a bit from the A22 Precision (which is still in the catalog) with the addition of an…