With deer season approaching, you might be shopping for the best rifle to buy for a child or an adult novice.
The best rifle is one you can shoot comfortably. Bullet diameter, or caliber, doesn't matter. If you can hold the rifle steady during detonation and follow through, you will accomplish your task.
This came up recently in an online exchange with Bryce Towsley, an internationally known gun writer who lives in Vermont. Every gun writer has a niche, and Towsley makes his living writing about big guns for every occasion.
In my 10 years as outdoors editor for this newspaper, however, I have gathered enough evidence to make a scientific case to the contrary. Every year, readers send me scores of photographs of youngsters posing with deer they have shot. The overwhelming majority used single-shot, break-action rifles chambered in .223 Rem.
A lot of those kids killed does, but a great number of them killed mature bucks.
A young fellow in my hunt club named Gunnar Smith has killed all five of his deer with a Rossi .223. One of those was a 200-pound, seven-point buck. It ran a short distance after the shot. The others dropped in their tracks. A couple were in the 200-yard range.
Smith's experience, along with the mountain of reader photos, has changed my thinking on this subject. Even a big deer is relatively small and fragile. A shot in the heart/lung area will kill it quickly. If you don't flinch from recoil, you will be able to hold the sight on the target area all the way through the shot. Good marksmanship is the most important factor in terminal performance.
I shoot a lot of .22-250 these days. I haven't used it on deer, but it has definitely made me a better shot with my bigger rifles. It doesn't kick, and the muzzle doesn't jump. This promotes good shooting technique that carries over to my bigger rifles. My favorites are mild kickers, too, such as my 6.5x55 Swedish, a 7mm Mauser and a 7mm-08.
Recoil used to terrify me. That changed about 20 years ago when Johnny Acton of Muldrow, Okla., taught me a simple technique to tame it. He transformed me into a confident, fearless shooter in about three hours. Big guns don't hurt anymore, but they are still harder to control. Correct shooting technique helps manage muzzle jump, but it's still easier to control a well-behaved muzzle.
Hunting deer or hogs with .22-cal. centerfires requires a tough, well-constructed bullet. The 60-gr. Nosler Partition and the 65-gr. Sierra GameKing are excellent, as is the 55-gr. Speer Boattail, the 55-gr. Remington PSP and the 50-gr. Hornady GMX. Frangible, hollow-point bullets -- like the Speer TNT -- are for varmint hunting and are not suitable for deer.
My reference frame for .22 centerfire is the .22-250 and the 220 Swift. Those are the fastest in that category. The .223 is a distant third.
Use what you want for deer as long as it's legal, but don't dismiss the .22 centerfires. In competent hands with appropriate ammo, they work.
GUN CLEANING
Shooting rifles is a lot of fun, but I hate cleaning them.
I am always looking for an easier, faster way to clean, but so far nothing outperforms repetitive scrubbing.
I've learned a few things, though. Most of us run a solvent soaked patch down the bore and follow quickly with dry patches over and over. It's more effective if you give the solvent time to work. Wait 20 minutes or so before dry patching. You'll be amazed at how much more fouling you'll remove. Repeat the sequence with copper solvent.
ORANGE BEACH
Regarding trends, we've received a lot of photos this summer of Arkansas youths catching fish in the Gulf of Mexico. The most popular destination was Orange Beach, Ala. A guide down there recently told me the fishing was superb all summer.
The Alabama Gulf Coast was a well-kept secret for many years, but apparently no longer.
There are still some hot secrets, like the South Carolina marsh, at the mouths of the Cooper and Ashley rivers, and the Georgia coast near St. Mary's.
That's hard travel for anglers in these parts so they'll never be as popular as the Gulf, but the fishing is outstanding.
EXTRA CREDIT
I mentioned in Thursday's column that four members of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission attended the Outdoor Hall of Fame induction banquet last Friday at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock. There were six, actually. Ron Duncan and Fred Spiegel also attended.
Sports on 09/14/2014