New Rifle Underwhelms

Today I took my new Marlin 60 .22 rifle out, scoped it, and tried to get it sighted in. It was a nightmare. It was so inaccurate, it actually scared me.

I have a cheap BugBuster scope. This is an amazing Chinese toy that gives 3-9x magnification with a lighted reticle. It’s very neat. I’ve been using it on an air rifle, and it works.

I was going to put my old Bushnell rimfire scope on the .22, but I lost part of a ring clamp. I ordered a scope mount for it. Then I decided I wanted to use the BugBuster instead. The new mount turned out to be too long for the BugBuster, so I had to move the air rifle mount to the Marlin.

Annoying.

I got everything set up, and I put a chair in the pasture about 50 feet from a target. Plenty close enough for sighting in. I shot, and I wasn’t on the paper. That scared me. I don’t want to send bullets over a road or another farm. I moved WAY up and started over. Even at 30 feet or so, I couldn’t do a thing with the rifle. It was spraying bullets into an area 4″ wide, and it was so inaccurate, I couldn’t figure out which way to turn the scope knobs.

I took the scope off and shot offhand at very close range, and I was still all over the place. I went and got a table, and I shot from a rest. Still bad. I switched from cheap Remington ammo to CCI Stingers. No help.

Finally, I went in the house and got my old Nylon 66 rifle. I was wondering if I had forgotten how to shoot. It was already full of cheap ammo. I blasted away offhand, and I shot into a very small area. The ammo worked.

You can imagine how frustrating this was. Nobody wants to go back to a store and say, “This rifle won’t hit the target.” You can imagine the response. “SURE it won’t. It’s a BAD BAD rifle. Maybe you should exchange it for a cast net.”

I threw some more rounds into the Marlin, and it shot just fine. I put more rounds in. Again, it shot well. I didn’t know what to think. It was getting dark, so it was too late to put the scope back on and try everything a second time.

I am perplexed. I know guns like to be broken in, but this is crazy.

At times like this, you start to wonder if you’re really a good shot.

I started trying to find Internet information on problems with new rifles. I found an irrelevant article by Chuck Hawks. This is a noted gun curmudgeon. I’m not sure he has any idea what he’s talking about. He says Smith & Wesson makes garbage, which is pretty much the opposite of my experience. Anyway, he wrote an interesting screed about accuracy.

He seems to think sub-MOA accuracy is mythical. Can that be true?

I have a .17 HMR rifle. The last time I shot it at 100 yards, I got either 1 MOA accuracy or so close to it, it’s virtually 1 MOA. I didn’t get the calipers out. It could conceivably be 1.1 MOA, but it’s not 1.2. It might be 0.95 for all I know. I know what an inch looks like, but I’m not a ruler.

I shot 5 consecutive rounds into a space an inch across. If you measured from the outsides of the holes, you would get a figure of an inch, +/-10%. If we’re going to split hairs, 1 MOA is actually more like 1.05″ than 1″.

Here is something Chuck Hawks said:

I have written it before and I will write it again: these groups are achieved on a word processor, not in the field. At best what the writer means is that once, when the stars were momentarily aligned in the sky, he shot a 1″ group with the test rifle. He will never admit in print that he shot nine other groups ranging in size from 2″ to 4″ with the same rifle.

However, the inexperienced and the gullible take these “test reports” to heart. The most absurd exaggeration is accepted without question, and endlessly repeated (and embellished) online. The boldest liars become authorities on marksmanship and rifle performance. It would be depressing if it were not so absurd!

I’ll tell you right now, I can shoot the .17 HMR in calm conditions and get 1 MOA accuracy or something so close to it, it doesn’t matter. I don’t practice much, I have no training, and I don’t try that hard, so I should be able to do somewhat better if I work at it. This is with a $200 rifle shooting store ammunition. Granted, it’s only 100 yards, but I can do it. I feel sure that if I can do it, a whole lot of other people can do it.

Can I do it while tromping around out of breath in the woods, without a rest? No way. My best guess is that I could shoot 2 MOA consistently if I had trees to lean on, but I don’t think I could do any better. I don’t know, because I don’t have any opportunities to do that kind of shooting. I suppose I could tape targets to trees, walk around, and shoot at them. Even then, it’s not like shooting an animal. Some animals will hold still and pose, making shooting them nearly as easy as shooting paper. Others aren’t cooperative.

Can I do it at longer ranges? I don’t know. The farther you get from targets, the more you have to know about shooting.

The caliber of the gun doesn’t matter. I’ve learned that shooting big guns with lots of recoil is just as easy as shooting little guns. The recoil comes AFTER you shoot, so it doesn’t affect your accuracy. If you can shoot a .17 HMR well, you should be able to shoot a scoped Ma Deuce well.

Hawks says hunters shooting animals with 8″ kill zones at 150 yards or less should be perfectly happy with 4-MOA guns. That sounds awful to me. Are there really guns that shoot that badly? I mean, do they shoot that badly with good ammunition, when held in a sled? To me, that’s how you define a rifle’s capabilities. A person holding a rifle will always shoot imperfectly, so it’s not fair to judge a gun by what it does when a person holds it. The sled should provide the best measure of a gun’s true capabilities.

If I were shooting a 4-MOA gun at 100 yards to sight it in, I wouldn’t know how to do it. If you have bullets splattering all over a 4″ circle, how do you know which way to turn the scope knobs? Do you fire 25 rounds to get some idea where the center of the 4″ circle is and then try to move that to the center of the target?

Hawks says 3 MOA is good enough for 200-yard kills. He also says no hunter should ever take a shot over 400 yards. The idea is that it’s cruel to the animal to risk wounding it without killing it cleanly.

I read this stuff, and then I think about the average shooter. Most people who shoot regularly would be lucky to hit the ground consistently if they tried. That’s my claim, based on what I’ve seen. I’ll bet 95% of hunters can’t shoot 3 MOA at the range, using a rest, with the best equipment in existence. I wonder what interesting stories guides have to tell. They must get a lot of clients whose marksmanship makes for good entertainment.

I think there are a lot of people out there who shouldn’t shoot at game over 75 feet away. Many people shouldn’t shoot at animals at all, except out of necessity.

I want to feel confident when I hunt. I want to know that there is very little chance an animal I shoot will run off and suffer because I didn’t kill it quickly. This makes me wonder about my dream of going out west and shooting prairie dogs at long distances. Maybe it’s a bad idea, or maybe if I do it, I should make a very serious study of accuracy and distance and limit my shots accordingly.

It’s probably a bad thing for hunters to brag about long shots. If a shot was lucky, you shouldn’t have taken it. If you’re really good, I suppose it’s another matter.

I don’t know how good 1 MOA at 100 yards is. Maybe it’s common. But it does sound like it’s good enough to get me in the door. I should be able to hunt competently and responsibly. If I can shoot 2-3 MOA in the field, I ought to be above reproach.

In the movies, people pull of insane shots. It’s all nonsense. In real life, shooting his hard, and even if you do everything right, you can’t shoot like Quigley or James Bond. Chris Kyle couldn’t do it, for that matter. James Bond is a fictional character. Daniel Craig and the rest of the boys never shot anything but blanks. In reality, now that I think of it, they probably couldn’t have hit a watermelon at ten feet. I doubt any of them ever had any training.

Tomorrow I’ll try the Marlin again. Maybe there was some kind of manufacturing crud stuck in the barrel, and I’ve blown it out. If it still shoots badly, I’ll return it.

The trigger is atrocious. It’s as if there are little rocks in the receiver, and you have to break them before the gun goes off. The Nylon 66 has a magnificent trigger. Truly exceptional. I wonder if the Marlin can be enhanced. I hate bad triggers. They say a good shot can overcome one, but I notice serious shooters insist on smooth triggers. If it really didn’t matter, would they do that?

If I can’t get it to work, I’ll probably get a Ruger 10/22. I should be able to get one to shoot accurately. If necessary, I could have the crown worked on. That should be a cheap job.