Back in 2019, I wrote a missive on 24hourcampfire.com on hunting deer where the bar for accuracy was rather low.

The Planet Where They Shoot 4 MOA Rifles

I would suggest you go over there and read it– read the whole thread if you like. It will really set the stage for what is to come. Planet 4MOA was a very real part of my life. I lived there for a good long time. This year, I managed to shoot a nice buck at 200 yards, and I realized that I had finally escaped Planet 4MOA and moved on. I am writing this now to:

• Tell you what life was like on Planet 4 MOA
• Give you a list of what it took to escape Planet 4 MOA
• Explain why I did it and what it meant for my deer hunting.

Definition

Let me begin by explaining why I call it Planet 4 MOA. MOA stands for Minute of Angle. 1 MOA is approximately 1 inch at 100 yards or 2 inches at 200 yards. 4 MOA is 4 inches at 100 yards. If you were reading outdoor magazines back in the day, a general rule of thumb was that a rifle was good enough to go deer hunting if you could shoot a 4-inch group (4MOA) at 100 yards. In a day where a lot of deer rifles were war surplus and manufacturing standards on new rifles were what they were, that made sense. When I was a kid and everyone, including tire stores, sold firearms, you could buy a new rifle for about $50-75. It probably shot somewhere close to 4 MOA. Saving up and purchasing a fancy rifle like a Winchester Model 70 might get you down to 2 MOA. It took work on the part of the shooter to get 1 MOA accuracy. Nowadays, modern manufacturing techniques are much better and most rifles you purchase, even the cheaper ones like a Ruger American or Mossberg Patriot will shoot 1 MOA out of the box.

Planet 4 MOA goes much deeper than that, however. It was not just the fault of the rifle. Part of it had to do with the ammunition, part of it was the sights. However, a good chunk of it was the space between the ears of the shooter. I would be the first to admit it. What is more, most of the folks around me were living there as well. We all lived in a world of fantasy, ignorance, lying, and self-deceit. The bottom line was we could not shoot worth spit.

Now let me be honest. I am a hunter who shoots and not the other way around. I enjoy shooting. Now that I am retired, I plan to do more of it. However, shooting has largely been a means to an end. That was how I got stuck on Planet 4 MOA for so long.

My Confession

They say the first thing you need to do when you’re in a hole like this is to

• Recognize you are in a hole
• Stop digging the hole deeper
• Start looking for a way out
• Admit you ain’t getting out of that hole without help

Most of my first 20 years of deer hunting were spent in that hole. I had come to shooting and hunting comparatively late in life, well after college. I had good mentors. One was a marine armorer. One was a shooting magazine editor. One was a veteran of The Bulge. Most had been in the military. Two had been in combat. A couple of them had competitively shot. I had good early training about gun safety and that sort of thing. I was usually on my own when it came to things like practice and sighting-in and such, and when we got together to shoot, we were not shooting at paper at very long distances. We were going out plinking and having fun.

I have to admit that going to a regular rifle range has never been my favorite thing. I get a bit rattled when there are a lot of other shooters near me. It’s noisy. What’s more, all the ranges that I belonged to were well away from home. If I wanted to do a little shooting after work, I would have to blow out of Downtown Cincinnati, and fight traffic for a half-hour. Drive another half-hour out some main 2-lane road and then roll around the back roads for a while and maybe get a half-hour to an hour of shooting in. By then it would be near dark, and I’d have to go home.

When hunting season came around, I would go out to Walmart and buy a couple of boxes of ammo, run out to the range, blow through a box or more and take whatever I had when the boxes were empty or it got dark and call it good enough. My buddies said it didn’t matter much. If I could keep it on a pie plate at 50 yards, that was good enough. If I was in a rush, I’d shoot at 25 yards so I did not have as much range to travel changing targets.

If I shot both boxes of ammo, I’d have to go back to Walmart and see what they had left. I would buy that, and I did not pay much attention to the number of grains and such. I felt lucky if I got the same color box.

I shot deer over the years. However, most of my concern was bow hunting. Hunting with a firearm was an afterthought. Most of my shots were inside 25 yards out of stands that I had set up for bow season. Deer fell over. I did not much care. I fully understood that old saying “I hits what I aims at.” This is a sure sign the hunter you’re talking to lives on Planet 4 MOA.

Recognizing the Problem

I always knew there was a problem. That is, I always had this nagging feeling that my shooting was not really up to scratch. I went out every year to sight in. I would fire off a few shots, usually at a target maybe 25-40 yards out. The rifle worked. The sight was sort of on. That was that. I had no real confidence in any of it, but I figured things would work out. As long as I kept the shots close, there would not be a problem.

There was no great epiphany. It happened over many years. The real start came after we bought the farm in 2001. I was in a rush to get moved in the first year, and nothing really happened. I remember rushing out with a couple of rifles and shooting out in the pasture, using one haybale for a target and another for a rest. I got two deer that year, both out of my main bow stand. Both were shots at less than 25 yards. #2 son, Mooseboy, was along for the second one. He thought he had seen the greatest act of hunting ever.

If I remember correctly, the next couple of seasons were somewhat like that. I put off sighting-in until the last minute. I shot off a wobbly table I had pulled out of the tobacco stripping shed. The rifles worked. That was enough. However, there was someone along now. Mooseboy had taken an interest, and I was trying to show him how to shoot, and I had safety and basic function down pat, but to describe how to shoot accurately. . . I fell back on the idea that if you could hit a pie plate at a given distance, you were good enough for deer. Mooseboy’s performance over the first couple of seasons sucked. It took about a decade for him to fess up that he was closing his eyes before shooting. The big problem was I did not know how to help him.

Part of the problem was that we did not have a good place to shoot. Over the summer, I built a shooting table and bench, and stuck it up on the front porch. Originally, it was built so the top and bottom would separate and be portable. We would drive out to one of the barns and set up. Over time, the bench stayed on the porch and we started shooting out into the field.

I started to reload in 2000. My reloads seemed every bit as good as factory rounds, but I wasn’t really sure. How could I be? That was another nag at my conscience.

Another thing that happened was that I found that writing about my outdoor experiences was getting popular. I had a couple of buddies, tell me I had real talent. I started writing seriously, and always had to skirt around my sub-par shooting abilities. They were not that bad. It was not like I was losing game left and right. For the most part, I pulled the trigger. The rifle went boom. The deer ran a bit and fell over. That was all that really mattered.

So what DID happen to get me off Planet 4 MOA? Nothing. You probably have seen some parallels in all this with addiction. However, this is false. There was no bottom. There was no intervention. I really could have gone the rest of my life with crappy shooting habits and filled my walls with antlers and no one would be the wiser. I just gradually decided to look at rifle accuracy in its own right and took it upon myself to improve. To that end, I have my online collection of crazy uncles, first at shooters.com and later at 24hourcampire.com to thank.

I call them crazy uncles because there is a special place in a man’s development for a crazy uncle. He’s the guy who you go to when it’s too weird to take to Dad. He is the one with the out-of-the-box solutions that made Mome stop inviting him to Thanksgiving. I was an only child and I never got to know my real uncles. However, I have managed to collect them throughout my life, and it is on their shoulders I stand.

What’s to Come

I am going to spend the next several weblog posts detailing how I got off Planet 4 MOA.

• Dealing with what was in my head
• What I did at the shooting bench and the gunsmithing bench
• What I did out in the field
• What I did with ammunition and reloading
• How it all paid off

None of this should be treated like a cookbook. This is just one escapee’s tale of what it took to get off the planet. The reader may find some things worth trying, but this is one of those tales where it is best to chew the meat and spit out the bones.

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