Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i Shooting Times

AS A MEMBER OF A NAVAL DISTRICT RIFLE TEAM, I HAD THE PLEASURE OF using a National Match M1. The gun was built by the Navy, glass bedded, match barrel, and chambered in .308. Still, it fed from the eight-round en bloc clip. We shot the national match course, and one day I posted a score of 98, prone at 600 yards—essentially 10 rounds on a dinner plate using iron sights. It was a terrific-shooting gun. But that score would not have been possible without the crusty Chief on the spotting scope, doping wind and feeding me sight corrections. Sometimes equipment alone is not enough. Larry Novak Augusta, KS Great on Ground Squirrels Reading Steve Gash’s article on the .22 Hornet in the September 2024 issue brought back pleasant memories.…

SHOWN HERE IS A NEAR-PRISTINE PREWAR WIN- chester Model 70. It’s not “new in the box with hangtag” pristine, but the finish is nearly 100 percent. The only indications that it was actually used are light indentations and marks on the stock and a bit of burnishing on the bolt. “Prewar,” by the way, refers to any rifle manufactured before the United States joined World War II. Winchester’s pre-World War II-era Model 70 was a premium American-made hunting rifle, surpassed only by true custom rifles. By far, the most common of the prewar, Pre-’64 Winchester chamberings was the .30 Gov’t. (.30-06). I’ve been fascinated by those versions ever since reading Frank Glaser’s exploits in his biography Alaska’s Wolf Man by Jim Reardon. By all accounts Glaser was a gun nut…

AS STEVE GASH RELATED IN HIS RECENT REVIEW of the Stoeger Coach Gun, due to a spate of robberies during the late 1800s, Wells Fargo began using two messengers armed with shotguns on stage runs with large amounts of treasure. One gutsy shotgun messenger was Eugene Blair. During his time with Wells Fargo, he was widely known and feared by many hardened criminals. Here’s his story. Eugene Blair was born on November 5, 1845, on a farm near Augusta, Kennebec County, Maine. By age 20, he had relocated to Nevada, where he worked as a miner, a jailer, and a policeman. Eventually, he became a Lincoln County deputy sheriff in the town of Pioche. By November 1872, he also was doubling as a Wells Fargo employee, and he soon had…

HORNADY HAS A NEW LINE OF HANDGUN AMMUNITION CALLED BACK- country Defense. Offered in 9mm Luger, .357 Magnum, 10mm Auto, .44 Magnum, .454 Casull, .460 S&W Magnum, and .500 S&W chamberings, this new line of ammo features Hornady’s DGH (Dangerous Game Handgun) bullets. These special bullets have protected points that lock the noses to the cores, providing maximum penetration and limiting deflection; produce no lead smoke, allowing faster follow-up shots; and are heavy for caliber, increasing downrange energy. They come in boxes of 25 or 20 rounds, depending on the chambering. MSRP: Not available at presstime hornady.com RCBS .22 ARC Die Sets RCBS has recently announced two new premium die sets for handloading the exciting new .22 ARC cartridge. The new Full Length Sizer Die Set Group A (shown) and…

AFICIONADOS KNOW THAT THE CREEDMOOR name is synonymous with long-range rifle competition. In 1872 the State of New York and the then-new NRA acquired 70 acres of land on Long Island for a range facility that rivaled British facilities at the Wimbledon Common. The Creedmoor Range was active until 1891, when matches were relocated to Seagirt, New Jersey. Today, over 130 years after the range closed, the name Creedmoor still evokes the craft of precision target shooting at long ranges. For much of the smokeless propellant era, .30-caliber rifles ruled long-range competition. The .30-06 dominated until the faster .300 H&H Magnum did well in long-range matches. Keeping the bullet supersonic at 1,000 yards to avoid sonic buffeting seemed a quest. Cartridge case capacity started to outgrow propellants’ ability to push.…

Q. I, TOO, HAVE A SPRINGFIELD ARMORY M1A AND LOVE THE RIFLE. IN Joseph von Benedikt’s specifications chart for his Springfield Armory M1A National Match on page 18 of the October 2024 issue of Shooting Times, he lists both the 7.62 NATO and the .308 Winchester as acceptable cartridges. I’ve been told many times to avoid the .308 ammo because of the softer primers used in that cartridge. Has something changed? Is it now okay to use .308 ammo in my M1A without worry? Tom Neil Via email A. It is safe to shoot .308 Winchester ammo in a modern M1A. The design is less likely to slam-fire than its M1 Garand predecessor so is less sensitive to use with the softer, nonmilitary-grade primers. When handloading ammo specifically for the…

THERE WAS AT LEAST ONE POSITIVE EVENT THAT occurred during COVID—the 6mm ARC was developed by Hornady for an unnamed U.S. military unit. Said military unit wanted a better ballistic option than the 5.56 NATO M16 but in a lighter-weight gun/cartridge combo than the 7.62 NATO AR-10. With all the technological advancements of more recent cartridge designs, such as those that are refined in the Hornady Precision Rifle Cartridges and the 6.5 Creedmoor, in mind, Hornady’s initial comprehensive engineering review indicated a heavy-for-caliber 6mm projectile launched from a PRC-type cartridge case was the appropriate path to achieving the desired performance. In the end, for the 6mm ARC (Advanced Rifle Cartridge), Hornady made changes to the 6.5 Grendel case. Reviewing the SAAMI drawings of those two chamberings, I noted the case…

AS THE WORLD’S #1 SUBSCRIPTION-BASED OUTDOOR STREAMING service, MyOutdoorTV has more than 20,000 episodes of premium hunting, fishing, and shooting content in a variety of both short- and long-form content. MyOutdoorTV offers original series, live streaming events, how-to videos, wild game recipes, and much more. While Shooting Times doesn’t have its own dedicated space on MyOut-doorTV, a few of our sister shooting-oriented titles do, and I’d like to draw your attention to one of them. I’m talking about Firearms News. For anyone who doesn’t already know it, Firearms News started way back in 1946 (it was called Shotgun News then). It’s gone through several modifications over the decades, and it’s still going strong. As stated on MyOutdoorTV, Firearms News is the only “paper gun show” in the industry, and now…

FORTY YEARS AGO, GIVE OR TAKE AN EON, BASK-ing in a reawakened passion for rifles after a long sojourn pursuing journalism to the ends of the earth, I was leafing through Cartridges of the World and came upon the .257 Weatherby Magnum. When I was a teenager, the very name “Weatherby” was magical, denoting sexy cartridges with double-radiused shoulders and rifles out of the Arabian Nights, carried by princes hunting Marco Polo sheep. At least that was the image, and something of that pixie dust lingered as my eye rested on the .257. Five years later, I found myself in Montana with a safari-grade Weatherby Mark V—a lovely custom rifle that, out of the box, grouped its first five shots of factory 100-grain ammo into 0.6 inch. Its first shot…