Prairie Dogs Never Have a Nice Day

It irks me that I know nothing about long range rifle shooting. I bought a .308 over a decade ago for the purpose of learning to shoot at long distances, and nothing came of it. I bought something like 1700 rounds of military ammunition made for machine guns, figuring it was good enough to start with and good enough in case I ever needed the gun for zombie hordes. I shot maybe 200 rounds. Then I quit. I have a million interests, and I flit from pursuit to pursuit like a fly meandering through a pasture full of unusually alluring cow pies. I’m fickle. Also, I lived in a city where shooting over 100 yards is impossible, except when firing into the air on holidays, if you’re Cuban.

The authorities actually had to inform citizens that shooting guns into the air on New Year’s Eve was a bad idea. They were not able to figure this out for themselves.

Yesterday I started looking around for a book on long range shooting, and someone said I should go take a class.

I scoffed. Long range shooting classes near me? Maybe in Montana or New Mexico. Not here.

Then I actually made an effort to find out what I was talking about, and it turned out I was wrong. Florida has been home to a number of facilities that teach long range shooting. Some are still around.

I emailed a couple of outfits, and naturally, I only got one response. Human nature never fails. I’m trying to blow hundreds of dollars, and only 50% of the people I’m trying to give it to thought it was worth their time to acknowledge me.

The guy who emailed me is a teacher. I sent him an email asking if my equipment was okay. The site says you need a rifle capable of 1 MOA shooting, plus a scope that doesn’t have a duplex reticle. I had to look that up to find out what it was. As for the rifle, how do I know if my guns will shoot 1 MOA? My .17 HMR definitely will, but it’s not useful past 200 yards. I have some other guns that probably will, but I haven’t been able to prove it, so does that mean I should go ahead and bring one, or do I wait until I’ve proven one of my guns will work?

Single-MOA shooting at 100 yards is no joke. It means you can usually hit a large grape a football field away. Most rifles can’t do it regardless of the ammunition or the skill of the person shooting. The rifles that can have to have the right ammunition, and you have to be able to shoot very well. You can’t just grab a random deer rifle at Dick’s, fill it with random ammunition, shoot leaning against a tree, and shoot 1 MOA. They do it in the movies, but movies are for idiots. I saw a movie where Will Smith threw a sperm whale.

The teacher said my .204 Ruger and my .308 would work, but he said my scopes were no good. What?

When I got the .308, I thought I splurged on the scope. The rifle was a screaming bargain at $775, and I probably paid $650 for the glass. I got a Leupold 20x scope with a 52mm objective and a varmint reticle. It’s not a 25x $2000 sniper scope, but on the other hand, it’s 10 times the scope Carlos Hathcock used to kill half the Viet Cong. I figured it had to be good enough for a hobbyist.

The course requires “target turrets.” Turrets are really dials. They move the crosshairs in your scope to the point where you expect your bullets to land. Most scopes have screw-on caps over the dials to keep them from getting banged up. A target turret–I am an expert after 15 minutes of Googling–is a big dial with large characters on it, and it’s not meant to be covered. If you’re a typical hunter, you don’t turn your dials much. You sight your scope in before you go hunting, and you cover the dials. If you’re a serious shooter, you want your dials–your turrets–available all the time so you can fiddle with them.

The teacher said I could rent a scope from the school, but then I would be paying someone to teach me how to set up a scope I would then remove and give back. That seems stupid. I want to set up my own scope.

I’m still not sure how turrets work, but it appears I can get aftermarket turrets to replace the ones that came on the Leupold. It’s very complicated, though. My existing turrets aren’t specific to any particular ammo, distance, or weather. Companies that sell turrets customize them to account for variables like these. I’ll bet that’s not necessary for what I want to do. I think the custom jobs are intended for people who want to be able to zip to predetermined settings for certain situations. There must be non-custom turrets out there for people who aren’t professional snipers and don’t mind doing more work.

This is my hope, anyway.

So this is where I am. If I can make the Leupold work, I will do just that. I know it can be done, because other people have done it. I just need to know what it will cost and whether it can be done in a time frame I can accept. I don’t want to wait for January to take a course.

While I’m figuring the scope out, I’m waiting on my LaRue AR triggers. Barring a negative miracle, they should fix my AR guns up so they shoot as well as possible for what they are. Both have free-floating barrels, so I don’t think I can improve them a whole lot after the triggers are installed. I may get a better buttstock for the LR-308B. The one that came with it is like the one on Elmer Fudd’s shotgun. A better buttstock will include some kind of riser for a better cheek weld.

I should bite the bullet and get a bipod for the AR15. I’m not a huge fan of rests. They always seem to be too low or too high, and for some reason, bipods have more range. Also, a bipod can’t fall off your shooting table.

I’ve been thinking of getting or making a dedicated shooting bench, but I have realized it’s a waste of time. I thought a dedicated bench would be lighter than my Home Depot folding table, but if it was, it wouldn’t be by much. Snob shooters may object to a table without a cutout, but the truth is that if you angle the table to the line of fire, it works just as well as a table with a cutout. On top of all this, it has a lot of extra area for ammunition and beverages. I would love to convince myself I need a new bench, but I can see that I don’t. I may need a new table, though, because I like having my only spare folding table in the house, and when I put it in the pasture for shooting, the cattle lick it and smear snot all over it.

What will I do with my long range shooting skills? Take a prairie-dog-killing vacation, maybe. I can shoot targets up to about 400 yards here at home.

The .204 Ruger is supposedly good for 500 yards with prairie dogs. That would be neat.

That’s a great caliber, because you can do match-grade shooting with cheap ammunition. I pay about 50 cents per round.

I think I’ve picked the final must-have caliber for my armory. Hornady just released something called the 6mm ARC. It’s blowing people away. You can shoot it from an AR15. It’s super-accurate, and at long distances, it outshines the .308. It doesn’t have much recoil. It’s supposed to be superior to other miracle cartridges like the 6.5 Grendel, to the point where some of them may be rendered obsolete. You can shoot big animals with it, so if I got one, I would no longer feel there was a gap in my capabilities. Right now, the only deer-worthy rifles I have are pretty strange.

If I can get 1 MOA from my CORE15 in .223, I’ll probably buy another one in 6mm ARC. I don’t know if CORE will offer it, but they’ll offer a lower and upper. I can get a barrel and scope myself.

I thought the CORE15 would be an entry-level weapon. I’m not so sure now. I keep learning whatever I can, and it appears that a suspicion I had is true: the guys who insist on $3000 AR15’s are buying flash, not function. My understanding is that an $800 rifle will do everything just as well, once you fix the trigger and possibly buy a barrel. If that’s true, do I really want to spend for something like a Daniel Defense? What do you really get? A prettier gun?

I saw a guy on Youtube going over an extremely expensive AR. It wasn’t available to the public, but it would have cost something like three grand. It had a weird bolt carrier with holes in it to lighten it, and everything was finished with some kind of space age stuff. He said it would cycle faster than a mid-tier AR. So what? A normal AR will do 600 rounds per minute if you can pull the trigger that fast. Am I missing something?

The lower on my AR is generally aluminum and plastic (“polymer”), so it should last 200 years. The barrel is a consumable item, easily replaced. The trigger I’m buying should be phenomenal. If there’s a good reason for moving to the top tier, I don’t see it. Maybe someone can explain it to me.

Let’s see. It looks like I can get most of a new AR for maybe $500. A precision barrel would probably run $200-$500. Trigger: $80. Then a minimum of $250 for glass. Not too bad, considering what a 1911 costs. And it would turn prairie dogs into vapor, if not plasma.

Know your enemy.

I think just about any gun purchase I make after 6mm ARC will have to fall under the heading “collecting.” I won’t be able to say I need anything else.

Well. Maybe a 12-gauge hunting shotgun, as contrasted with the video-game-looking semiauto I already have.

I’m going to try to get into a shooting class this summer. Thousands of miles away, prairie dogs are snickering at me, and I simply won’t have it.