.338 Lapua Magnum

A brand most of our US readers probably haven’t heard of is set to make a splash in the near future, if our initial look at the new Virtrix Rifle line up is any indication. Virtrix is an Italian rifle company, known for precision armaments.

I am a firm believer that it should be within the reach of every person to own a ludicrously fast car, a stupidly powerful handgun and a magnum rifle that could take a T-rex off its feet at 1,000 yards. Savage has made that attainable. Enter the Savage 110 BA Stealth. It delivers high performance at a fraction of its .338 Lapua competitors.

Last week we got the opportunity to attend an event hosted by Savage Firearms, Federal Ammunition, and Bushnell Optics. We shot a mountain of ammunition around the T-Diamond Ranch in Texas, engaging targets from 10 yards all the way to 1,620. It was a great opportunity to get hands on with some of the new toys being released this year, and to pick the stuff for review that our readers are going to want to know more about.

the DRD Tactical Kivaari .338 Lapua Magnum is a long-range, semi-automatic, AR-based rifle that can be taken down in moments and placed inside a portable case.

American Rifle Company has been building and selling some great scope mounts, but the intent has always been to build guns. The company was at SHOT Show with the prototypes for these guns, most notably the M2 precision rifle. This is a multi-caliber platform that will handle everything from .308 Winchester to .338 Lapua Magnum. While their other rifle, the M5 Mausenfield, was built on a Remington 700 footprint, the M2 has a custom footprint. American Rifle paired this custom footprint with a Springfield ejector and a Mauser type extractor. It basically cherry picked the best features of the guns out there and then invented what the designers couldn’t find, like the toroidal bolt head. The bolt head has semi circular bolt lugs. The bearing surface of the lugs engages a spherical bearing surface in the receiver, creating very strong lock up, which means that the bolt is insensitive to its alignment in the receiver. This is just one feature that contributes to the gun’s overall accuracy.

There were not a lot of rock star new guns this year at SHOT Show 2013, but one of them was the ArmaLite AR-30A1. It is an out of the box, sub-MOA sniper rifle that comes in either .338 Lapua Magnum or .300 Winchester Magnum. ArmaLite was kind enough to put us at the front of the list for testing this gun, and this week we shot the .338 Lapua Target version of the AR-30A1. Overall it not only performed flawlessly, but also handily beat every chassis and chassis-style sniper rifle we have ever tested for out of the box accuracy, recoil, ergonomics and just overall feel. The AR-30A1 is a tight, clean, long range sniper machine and will be equally at home in a SWAT truck gun rack as it will be on the line at a long range F-Class match. At a direct from ArmaLite price of $3,599, there is not an out of the box sniper rifle on the planet that compares to the AR-30A1 in this price range. I would even go so far as to challenge rifles twice the price to prove why they are worth more.