With all the really good bottom end deer rifles out there, folks are beginning to lose sense of what it was like to own a deer rifle that couldn’t hold to a pie plate at 50 yards. As I opined here on the 24hourcampfire:
You have to understand a bit of the history. It used to be that you needed to pay a premium and do quite a bit of work to get to the kind of accuracy we are seeing with out-of-the-box offerings now. It used to be that. . .
1) Ammo was kind of hit-and-miss. Lot-to-lot consistency was not what it is now. It used to be if you found something that worked, you’d have to buy as much of that lot as you could. That’s one of the reasons reloading became popular; it allowed you to build more consistent ammo.
2) Optics were not nearly as good. It used to be your scope would go off-kilter every whipstitch, and it would take a box or two of ammo every year to get it figured out.
3) Stocks would warp. Inletting was iffy.
4) Triggers could be downright abominable.
30 years ago, it was kind of axiomatic that a 4 MOA rifle was okay for deer hunting. It still probably is, but you can do a heck of a lot better with not as much cost or effort. Nowadays, if I bought a 4 MOA deer rifle brand new, I would demand my money back.
A Savage Axis has a street price of $250, give or take. In 1989, adjusting for inflation, that rifle would be worth $120. However, you could not get anything near a 2019 Savage Axis for $120. Instead, a Rem 700 cost about $350+. A $120 rifle (I bought one around then) would be more like a used Winchester 670 that looked it had been dragged behind a truck on a chain. It had been purchased new in the early 70’s at K-Mart and traded between family members in rural KY before one of the brothers brought it North to a gun show to dump it. I was the dumpee. To get to where a new $120 gun would get you 1 MOA accuracy out of the box might be well back into the early 1960’s. However a $120 rifle back then would be a $1200-1500 rifle now.
This was met with some degree of disagreement. Specifically, some folks felt that 4 MOA rifles were never considered proper and acceptable. My answer to them is here:
The Planet Where They Shoot 4 MOA Deer Rifles
Note: for those of you who don’t know a MOA from a MOAB, MOA stands for Minute of Angle. I’m not going to get all technical here. However, a 1 MOA rifle shoots a group 1″ in diamber at 100 yards, and a 2″ group at 200 yards. A 4 MOA rifle shoots a 4″ group at 100 yards and shoot Lord-Knows-Where at 200 yards.
It would seem that, for a change, I am the ultimate expert on a subject. It would also seem that a lot of the folks on 24hourcampfire.com re must have been living in a parallel universe to the one I was experiencing back in the 1980’s. In their world 4 MOA rifles weren’t acceptable. In mine, they were quite common. Not only that, we accepted them and we used them to kill things. I suppose it could be said that just about anyone can make a 1 MOA rifle work. However, it takes a certain genius to turn a 4 MOA tomato stake into a legitimate deer killer.
I got a used Rem 742 in 30-06 back in the early 80’s. With Remmie Corelokts, it was a solid 4 MOA rifle. It didn’t matter much. I was a bow hunter who spent rifle season in his deer stands. It was hard seeing past 50 yards, let alone shoot anything. I later added a WIN 670 in 30-06. It wasn’t all that accurate as a deer rifle, but it shot 30-06 Accelerators well, and so it became my groundhog gun. I called it “The Vaporizer,” because it would turn a woodchuck into a cloud of mist.
So how does one cope with a 4 MOA rifle?
1) To the rest of the world, you lie a lot. To yourself, you know your limits and you stick with them. You’ve got a scope on it– it must be accurate. For those who don’t know it looks awesome. For those who do know, the REM 742 is a tip-off that the jokes need to be told slower.
2) Deer hunters like me learned to deal in paces or steps instead of yards. You called them yards, but deep inside you knew better. I once had a fellow tell me he shot a big buck at 300 yards with his 30-30 by just puttin the irons in the middle of the chest, and pullin’ the trigger. He was about 5foot-nothin. He probably had a stride that was inside of 24 inches.
3) Parallax? Shmaralax! I was told to set my scope to be dead on at 50 yards (paces) and be done with it. Anything else? Just hold onto the top of the back. If it’s too far out, the bullet goes underneath the buck’s legs.
4) Grains mean nothing. I shot mostly 180 grainers, but I bought whatever was available for years. If there were 150 grainers, they shot just as good. Don’t bother sighting in with each little change, you’ll just waste ammo. I found that 180 grain Musgrave (South African) shot well in the 742, so I bought a case of it.
Quit laughing. I’m giving history here. Y’all probably laugh at the guys who go to Walmart and buy a new deer rifle the night before the Opener and get it bore sighted by the counter monkey. No. I was never one of those. However, I did figure out one time that a bore-sighted 30-06 will probably take a deer out to 80 yards or so from a raised stand. It may sound ugly, but that’s the truth.
5) Forget paper targets with bullseyes. Just get a big reactive target and fill it with something so it goes blooey. A 5 gallon bucket with water is fine. A 2 -liter of diet Walmart Soda is cool if you want to be a sharpshooter. Now put it out at 25 yards and shoot at it until it goes blooey. Tell yourself that you’re good to go.
Remember: this is a 4 MOA rifle you’re talking about. At best you can probably keep it on a pie plate at 80 yards offhand.
6) Don’t read those stupid magazines that talk about premium ammo and all that crap. For one thing, finding that ammo on a regular basis at Walmart ain’t going to happen. Second, this is a 4 MOA rifle for chrissakes. It’s going to shoot $5 boxes of ammo just as good as $20 dollar boxes.
7) Groups are for somebody else. What I had to go for was more of a pattern. If I knew it would hit a pie-plate at a given distance, that was all I needed. I wasn’t going to get much better– and certainly not better offhand. If you read a magazine that talks a lot about groups, they’re just telling you stuff about rifles that have nothing to do with what you have. You’re there to kill deer, not make groups.
8) The best time to find a solid 4 MOA deer rifle is at the gun show right after deer season. Everybody’s selling off their deer rifles for Christmas money. You’ll get your best deals on 4 MOA , 6 MOA and 8 MOA rifles then. Make sure you shake the rifle. You want a scope that has some rattle to it. You can get $25 or more off if you find one that rattles.
Look, I went 20+ seasons shooting this crap. Even worse, I shot a Remington 1100 12 GA with Remmie Sluggers for the first 5 years. Crap? This isn’t crap when your longest shot is nearly straight down out of a treestand. Both 30-06 and 12 GA slugs are awesome inside 10 yards, and the number of MOA’s just doesn’t enter into any of it.
So how did I end up here? Just because I shot Rem 742 for a number of years, I’ve been called a booger-eating moron. Truth is, it took a lot of creativity and determination to make that rifle work. Furthermore, I came to the 24hour campfire after I started reloading in 2000, I started paying attention to those things like “grains” and “Point Blank Range” and stuff like that. It didn’t change my deer hunting all that much, at least not at first. With the way the cedar thickets grow, we’re still mostly talking short shots, but now we’re doing with much greater precision (for whatever good that does.)
The Rem 742 died from a bad case of the chatters back in 2004. #2 son still hunts with my Win 670. I think the last doe he shot with was somewhere just outside of 5 yard’s distance when he lit her up. Again, this is perfectly acceptable range for a 4 MOA rifle. Once I started reloading, I found I could get it shooting down close to 1 MOA. Angus has the camp record of shooting a deer with it at 252 yards a few years ago. My personal best is still down around 175 yards.
Most of what I know about 1 MOA rifles and reloading comes from here and shooters.com. When I started reloading, I’ll tell you that it was like a whole ‘nother world.
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