Choosing a Rifle for Hunting

[one_half padding=”0 0 0 0px”] [/one_half] [one_half_last padding=”0 0 0 0px”] [/one_half_last] Ruger knows the rimfire market. There’s a lot to say about Ruger’s latest addition to the rimfire line. They run off of the 10/22 magazine and are tack drivers.  The rifles are lightweight, indestructible and inexpensive. That last part is hard to wrap your head [...]

“What is the best gun for hunting hogs?” I asked this question to everyone I knew for more than a month before my hunt. I Googled it at least 20 times. Everyone seems to have a different opinion. Some prefer the compact design and rapid-fire potential of the AR-15. Others leaned toward the power and range of the .30-06 and .308s. Those who’ve hunted with a good 6.8 spc were passionate about the caliber’s performance. No one mentioned 7.62×39, much less the venerable AK platform’s design. As one who prefers the Kalashnikov over the Stoner, I knew what I was going to take. And now, after the hunt, I’d put my Arsenal AK up against the biggest tooth hogs south Florida has to offer.

The Arsenal AK line in 7.62×39, with the right soft point ammo, can be an effective rifle for hunting. The Arsenal AK line in 7.62×39, with the right soft point ammo, can be an effective rifle for hunting.
When I was presented with the opportunity to hunt hogs with Dwayne “Hog Man” Powell and Kissimmee River Hunt and Fish, a guide service out of Okeechobee, Florida, I decided I’d set up some real-world reviews, too. We were going to hunt, and I knew Dwayne was going to put us on hogs. Dwayne is the Jim Cramer of hunting guides. If you can catch it or hunt it in Florida, Dwayne Powell will show you how. For those of us looking to test guns, Hog Man gives a veritable guarantee.

I had a variety of guns at my disposal. I could have taken any number of AR-15s into the bush. I had a .30-06, a couple of 6.8s. There were five of us hunting, so we each went out with something slightly different.

Kinetic energy does not matter. Accuracy almost does not matter. The headstamp on the case certainly does not matter. Having more shells in the magazine does not matter. How well you can hit with your rifle is almost all that matters!

What if I were to tell you that there is a rifle out there that will let you take more deer and elk; and bears and sheep and caribou and coyotes; and kudu? Yes, there is a rifle out there that will make you more successful in virtually any hunting situation you can imagine. Now your mind immediately goes to the biggest, fastest, largest, longest and most expensive kind of machine modern technology can create. But alas, this is going to be much simpler and down to Earth than you might imagine.

I am about to offer you the keys to the kingdom of hunting-rifle success; keys gleaned from several decades of hunting and the observation of more than 1000 head of big game being taken. This is not about me, but about the dozens of men, women and young shooters I have guided or known around the world. Folks just like you who I have watched succeed and fail, often very simply because of the rifle, or more accurately the cartridge they have chosen. Kinetic energy does not matter. Accuracy almost does not matter. The headstamp on the case certainly does not matter. Having more shells in the magazine does not matter. How well you can hit with your rifle is almost all that matters!

What if I were to tell you that there is a rifle out there that will let you take more deer and elk; and bears and sheep and caribou and coyotes; and kudu? Yes, there is a rifle out there that will make you more successful in virtually any hunting situation you can imagine. Now your mind immediately goes to the biggest, fastest, largest, longest and most expensive kind of machine modern technology can create. But alas, this is going to be much simpler and down to Earth than you might imagine.

I am about to offer you the keys to the kingdom of hunting-rifle success; keys gleaned from several decades of hunting and the observation of more than 1000 head of big game being taken. This is not about me, but about the dozens of men, women and young shooters I have guided or known around the world. Folks just like you who I have watched succeed and fail, often very simply because of the rifle, or more accurately the cartridge they have chosen.

Pick up just about any gun magazine these days and you will see ads for MOA accuracy, guaranteed, out of the box. MOA means “minute of angle,” which is 1/360th of a circle. It seems like a great selling point and I’m sure it sells a lot of guns, but I wondered if the claims were actually true. If you don’t understand MOA it is understandable. what does a fraction of a circle have to do with the accuracy of a rilfe? But we’ll get to that.

Not everyone is capable of shooting MOA, even with the most accurate rifle, so I employed our local neighborhood US Army Sniper (and GunsAmerica Magazine contributor), Ben Becker. The results are astounding. All of the rifles we tested (and we didn’t just test rifles that advertise MOA) shot into or nearly into a minute of angle at 100 yards. Some even did it for 10 and more rounds in a row, without cool down. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are living in the Golden Age of firearms manufacturing. This is incredible stuff.

Please don’t take this as a “head to head” comparison for these rifles against each other or against other rifles in the market we didn’t test. The list of guns we tested is in no way comprehensive. We were able to get rifles from Beretta (Sako, Tikka), Savage, Thompson Center and CZ. Noticeably absent are of course Remington, Browning, Winchester, Weatherby, Ruger and others. This article was not meant to be comprehensive. We just wanted to see what is going on out there in some quality production rifles and these are the ones we could get. There is no reason to believe that the rifles missing from this test wouldn’t perform just as soundly as the rifles we were able to shoot.

I am a .17 lover, in spite of my reputation for liking really big guns. Being a .17 shooter is sort of like other things your friends and family would like to keep in the closet. But trust me; it is okay to like the wee rifles because there are few things that go bang that are as much fun.

To buy and like a .17 of any size you have to overcome the opinions of “experts” and writer types who will tell you all of the “bad” things about them. If you begin with the foundation that it is likely few of these naysayers have ever fired a .17, it immediately makes you feel better about the smallest of the commercial rounds. That they foul badly, are inaccurate, blow like feathers in the wind and have no killing power is simply untrue. My sweet seventeens have mostly been centerfires, and their emphasis has been on speed. Many of them are honest 4000 fps propositions and the fastest bullet I have ever chronographed was a .17, fired over the Oehler at 4600 fps. I have shot numerous sub-half-inch groups, thumped lots of various small critters, a few coyotes and some deer. With my long term affection for .17s it will not surprise you that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the Hornady Rimfire when it was released over a decade ago.

The cartridge first known as “Ball Cartridge, Caliber .30, Model of 1906” is without question the most famous American rifle cartridge, not only in our own country but throughout the world. In 1903 we replaced the Krag-Jorgensen in .30-40 Krag with the long-serving and much-loved 1903 Springfield and a new .30-caliber cartridge. The Springfield was a Mauser clone, its rimless cartridge similar to Mauser’s designs, but longer with more case capacity. The initial 1903 cartridge was loaded with the same 220-grain roundnose bullet as the Krag, but in 1906 the bullet was changed to a faster and more aerodynamic 150-grain spitzer. At the same time the case neck was shortened by .07-inch, thus the Model of 1906—the .30-06—went forward to make history. The .30-06 served the United States in both World Wars, the Korean conflict, the early years of Vietnam, and a dozen banana wars in between. It was chambered to the Springfield, the Pattern 14 Enfield, the Marine Corps’ Johnson semiauto, the Garand, the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), and several versions of the Browning machinegun. Clear into my time, the 1970s, the .30-06 was still seeing use both with snipers and in the Browning light machinegun.