Bigger rifles look like an easy fix for bad shooting, but they are not a shortcut to clean kills. Jim Carmichel, Our Legendary Shooting Editor, has spent a lifetime watching hunters chase more power instead of better skills, and his verdict is blunt: simply choosing a bigger cartridge is a bad idea in normal deer…
Rifle makers keep shaving ounces, and hunters keep asking for lighter guns to haul up mountains and through thick timber. The surprise comes at the range, when that featherweight that carried so nicely suddenly feels twitchy on the bags and unforgiving in the field. There are real mechanical reasons why a light rifle can be…
When people reach for a shotgun to protect their home, the next question is almost always the same: what should I load it with. The choice between buckshot and birdshot is not a minor detail, it is the difference between ammunition built to stop a human threat and ammunition built to bring down a pheasant…
Every New Year’s Eve and on plenty of big game days, someone steps out on a porch, points a pistol skyward, and squeezes the trigger, convinced the only thing at risk is the night sky. The physics and the medical records tell a very different story. When a bullet goes up, it comes back down…
Experienced hunters do a handful of things so consistently that they almost feel boring, but those habits are exactly what stack the odds. I look at them as quiet systems, not lucky breaks. If you want to hunt like the guys who fill tags year after year, these are the eight moves they treat as…
Accuracy with an air rifle rarely comes down to one big decision. In small game hunting and pest control, the quiet, low-recoil rigs many of us favor are sensitive to a handful of gear choices that either tighten groups or scatter them. I have watched air rifles that were “laser accurate” on paper fall apart…
Caliber myths hang on longer than bad hunting stories at deer camp, and they shape what people carry, buy, and trust when it matters most. I want to walk through ten of the worst offenders, using hard test data instead of gun-counter folklore, and show where the numbers flat-out contradict the legend. 1. Myth: .45…
Most guns do not die in a blaze of glory, they fade out from quiet abuse and neglect. Little habits around cleaning, storage, and ammo choice can chew years off a firearm’s useful life without you noticing until accuracy falls off or parts start breaking. I want to walk through ten specific mistakes that, according…
Most shooters blame the gun, the ammo, or the wind when their groups open up, but the real problem is usually baked into their own habits. The ten mistakes below quietly wreck accuracy every day, even for experienced folks who should know better. Clean up these fundamentals and you can tighten groups with the rifle…
Plenty of guns are marketed as “budget friendly” and “battle ready,” but anyone who has run cheap hardware hard knows those promises do not always hold up. When a defensive gun or hunting rifle fails at the wrong moment, the price tag stops mattering. Drawing on the kind of tradeoffs laid out in detailed rundowns…