GunsAmerica Blog Product Reviews – Accessories and Gun Related items

With all the talk we have around here about long range accuracy and long distance shots, very little of it applies to actual big game hunting. Punching paper has almost no relationship to hunting in the field. Paper targets just sit there. You don’t have to work hard to find them. They don’t move. It is almost like they were made to sit there and let you shoot at them. Oh yea, they were. Most shots on deer, hogs and even most African game is taken well inside of 100 yards, and often less than 50 yards.

None of those things are true with actual game, whether it is a Whitetail deer in the Pennsylvania woods, or a hog in the Everglades, or a Kudu on the plains of Africa. Wild game is almost always moving somewhat, and they are usually pretty darned hard to find, especially the big ones. When it is time for your shot, the shot you worked really hard to get and probably prayed for by your bedside the night before, you don’t want to look down your rifle and discover that you have the wrong optic for the job. Even at 4 power magnification a moving deer 75 yards away can be a difficult target to find in your scope when split seconds count. Yet optics are preferable in many ways to iron sights, because you don’t have to align them.

The Slide Fire is a $369 replacement stock for your AR-15 that when used properly, simulates automatic fire. Since the invention of the semi-automatic rifle people have been learning to do what is called “bump firing” the gun. You hold the gun in a loose way and allow it to rock back and forth against the trigger finger, which simulates automatic fire. It is fun, but it burns a lot of ammo without any real ability to aim at anything.

High end optics have historically not done well in the American market, We will spend any number of hard earned dollars for the newest and greatest rifle in the newest and most devastating caliber, but when we go to buy a scope for it, we cheap out. Europeans tend to go the opposite way. They will take much more pride in a fine optic than a fine rifle, and that is where they prefer to spend their money. An American will put a $500 scope on a $3,000 rifle, whereas a European will put a $3,000 optic on a $1,000 rifle.

I don’t know when this changed, but it is recent. All of a sudden, right here in the good old USA, optics in the $1,500 plus range have come into focus in the market (pun intended), and people are buying them.

Practice, Practice, Practice! That is what just about every article you read on how to improve your shooting will say. But how do you do that at 20 cents a round? There is no cheap surplus .ammo around anymore, so if you really want to punch paper or clang steel a lot you pretty much have to either be a trust fund baby, marry a trust fund baby, or find a way to shoot .22s. At pennies a round and available pretty much everywhere, there is no better tool for honing your shooting skills on the cheap than .22 Long Rifle ammo and a gun that shoots it well.

You can of course just go out and buy a regular garden variety .22, like a Ruger 10-22, Remington Nylon 66, Beretta NEOS, and numerous examples from Henry that are very affordable and shoot really well.

The problem with this approach however is that when you practice, most of what you are practicing is muscle memory and natural point of aim. Both of these will be different with a standard .22 than they will with your self defense or competition rifle. You can buy a gun that looks like yours, or even feels like yours, but there will be no substitute for being able to shoot your actual gun with .22 ammo.