Get Out Hunting!

The whitetail deer is the #1 sought after big game animal in North America, and years ago hogs were just considered target practice while one was out during the deer hunt. Today in Florida, where I live, the wild hog is gaining ground quickly as a favorite to hunt. There are several different reasons why I believe wild boars are gaining such increased attention. The main reason? The excitement. There is a definite element of danger that you don’t have while hunting deer.

A mature wild boar weighing over 200 pounds will attack viciously without prejudice and so will a sow with shoats. Be careful when hunting these formidable wild creatures. It baffles me how the state of Florida can classify wild hogs as small game. This classification must have been determined by someone who has never seen the cutters or whetters on these animals. I recommend always carrying a sidearm when hunting boar; I don’t ever go without one. It’s better to be safe than sorry. I have seen a few videos showing wild boar attacking a hunter, and in most cases, the hunters have been cut to the bone with those razor sharp cutters. As for average shooting distances, most are relatively close, within 100 yards. While many calibers will suffice, my personal favorite is my Marlin CS 3030 Lever Action that used to be my New York brush gun for whitetails. I believe, for most people, a 223 would be the minimum caliber I would humanely use.

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.

So… you have finally saved up enough money and made up your mind to take that hunting trip of a lifetime. If you have never taken an extended hunting trip …you ask yourself “What do I need? At this point, you probably have already picked a game species to hunt and the state or province where you plan on pursuing that game animal. If you haven’t, don’t panic, you still have time to put something meaningful together but you need to start right after you finish reading this article. In order to point you in the right direction I have listed the top tips to help you plan for that memorable hunting trip you are about to take. If you are going with friends or family members make sure that everyone is on the same page. Make your plans and coordinate your equipment together. Proper planning and preparation will benefit everyone. I can go on and on about this topic, but I will touch upon the main points of groundwork in order to keep things in perspective.

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.

As much as I love, own and shoot modern shotguns, there is really nothing like a classic side by side doublegun. If you have never tried one, do yourself a favor and go heft one up to your shoulder in a gunshop. You may say eh, no big deal, but you also may fall in love, I warn you. The side by side shotgun has a contagious kind of energy to it, something like a built in romance, for a lot of us anyways.

While I will never claim to be anything close to being an expert in turkey hunting….I have pursued the quarry on more than a few occasions. I’ve named all those turkeys the “Roadrunner” which of course, makes me “Wile E. Coyote” and no… I am not the “Super Genius”. Far from it, according to my wife. I do give myself an “A” for effort though. How an animal whose head houses a brain the size of a pea can beat me and thousands of other hunters time & time again…for that I definitely do not have an answer. I make no excuses for not being able to routinely beat this Old World majestic game bird. I suppose that is what draws the strange breed of turkey hunters that obsess, scout, gear up, & lose countless hours of sleep and family time to outsmart a gobbler. It can be done and gets done thousands of times each year every Spring and Fall all across this great country of ours. While I will never claim to be anything close to being an expert in turkey hunting….I have pursued the quarry on more than a few occasions. I’ve named all those turkeys the “Roadrunner” which of course, makes me “Wile E. Coyote” and no… I am not the “Super Genius”. Far from it, according to my wife. I do give myself an “A” for effort though. How an animal whose head houses a brain the size of a pea can beat me and thousands of other hunters time & time again…for that I definitely do not have an answer. I make no excuses for not being able to routinely beat this Old World majestic game bird. I suppose that is what draws the strange breed of turkey hunters that obsess, scout, gear up, & lose countless hours of sleep and family time to outsmart a gobbler. It can be done and gets done thousands of times each year every Spring and Fall all across this great country of ours.

The folks at Gibbs Rifle Co. have a history of taking surplus military rifles of arguably minimal collector interest and turning them into sport specialty rifles that have a serious “fun gun” factor and “tough as nails” demeanor. Perhaps the best known of them are the Summit and Quest chambered in .45-70 and .308, respectively. Those were built on surplus Enfield actions and were not attempts to reproduce any sort of historical military gun at all. Instead, they were practical, utilitarian rifles that made good use of surplus military and some new parts. “Commercial sporterizing,” probably best describes it, and as Gibbs puts it, they “…take the best features of historic military arms and translate them to meet modern sporting needs.”

Calling all hunters! While most of the hunting world is off thinking about whitetails in the fall, varmint and predator hunters are gearing up for an exciting summer. I decided to write this article in collaboration with our regular hunting contributor Carlos Lopez, and our newest discovery, Dwayne Powell, who runs Kissimmee River Hunt and Fish in Okeechobee, Florida, to see if you guys would like to see a summer full of hunting here at GunsAmerica Magazine & Blog. Carlos and Dwayne are passionate hunters and hunt all year, and if we all would like them to share some of their summer experiences with us, they have agreed to put it together. Some folks would argue that hunting goes away until after the kids go back to school, but we disagree. Varmint and predator hunting is all year round, and even if you can’t get out this summer, there is a great deal of merit to keeping your head in the game. Please comment on this article, like it on Facebook, and tweet it on Twitter if you feel like you’d like to see the tactics, the guns and gear in action that you will use this fall, or during the summer yourself.

You may never have even heard of the biggest innovation in terminal ballistics since the hollow point. It has been around for more than five years, and the bullets are made from compressed powder, wrapped in a standard copper jacket. Loaded ammunition is available in most common rifle calibers, as well as the usual handgun suspects and even some exotic hunting calibers. The bullets alone are also available in bulk for the handloader. The company is called DRT, or Dynamic Research Technologies. If you hit a living being with a DRT bullet, it will become our definition of DRT, “(D)ead (R)ight (T)here.”