Equipment for Real Social Distancing

I’ve been home from the 1000-yard range for three days, and I already have a bunch of new equipment on the way. Snipers rolled me out of the bed of ignorance, and I hit the ground running.

I’m going to be shooting a Ruger Precision Rifle. Is it the best choice for beginners? I do not know. It looks like there are a number of good guns out there at the lower end of the PRS market. The RPR is extremely popular, so even if it isn’t the best gun, there will be all sorts of support for it.

I wanted to get a simple shooting mat. I figured this would be a three-minute research project. WRONG. From using borrowed mats over the weekend, I knew there were certain things I didn’t want in a mat, and when I looked at various products, I kept seeing those problems.

One mat I used had black patches on it for reinforcement in certain areas. When the sun hit them, they got blistering hot. That’s no good, so no dark mats. Some mats were too narrow. You need a little room for your junk, so the narrow mats were out. One mat, which doubled as a case, had hardware on the inside where it would scratch weapons. Come on. Really?

There are thin mats. There are mats made from cheap fabrics. There are mats that soak up water because they have open-cell foam.

I gave up and ordered a very expensive mat which is popular among SEAL’s. Sometimes you have to suck it up and buy the best, or what appears to be the best. Fine. I’ll get over it.

My AR-15’s scope is less than a month old, and I have to get rid of it. It’s worthless for any type of shooting involving DOPE or holdovers. I don’t plan to use the AR for really serious shooting, but I want to be able to get out to maybe 800 yards, so I have to have MIL’s and target turrets. A company in Texas makes a shockingly good 4-14x MIL-dot scope for a very low price. It has the blessing of various long-range experts. It will be more than good enough for an AR-15 with a factory barrel.

I bought an inch-pound torque wrench for mounting optics. This was surprisingly hard. Gunsmithing companies make little torque screwdrivers, but people complain about how cheap and fragile they are. A serious inch-pound screwdriver runs hundreds of dollars. I ordered a beam wrench, which is the old-fashioned kind of wrench your granddad used. It will be fantastic for scopes, it will never break, and it’s easy to read. And it was cheap.

I bought the cleaning stuff the snipers recommended. They like Bore Tech Eliminator. They spelled out the reasons, but I don’t remember them. I have very good cleaning products that work well, but long-range shooting is a strange game, and anything the pros don’t want inside their barrels is probably something that shouldn’t be there. Cleaning affects accuracy. If Eliminator makes snipers happy, there must be a reason for it. They would know if their guns weren’t shooting well.

I bought a pint, which ought to last me until I die.

Ammo is interesting. Believe it or not, people commonly shoot 1 MOA with very cheap 6.5 Creedmoor ammo at 100 yards. Great, right? Just buy cheap ammo. Not so fast. Ammo that kills mice a football field away may do weird things 900 yards farther downrange. I decided to try Hornady ELD 140-grain match ammo. It’s a ballistic tip cartridge, and it’s supposed to be very good. Sadly, it’s not great for hunting. It’s just like the ballistic tip ammo used for coons and so on, but the cup the tip sits in is tiny, so I guess the rounds don’t expand much.

The gun won’t be for hunting anyway. I may use it for that, but it will be very heavy because it’s made for accuracy. I could see using it when not too much walking is involved.

I have a Vortex scope on the way for the Ruger. It’s a very nice MIL-dot scope. It was discontinued so Vortex could sell a new reticle, but there is nothing wrong with the old reticle. I saved something on the order of 50%. I am very happy about that. To do better, I pretty much have to move up to a new level and spend somewhere around $2500. That would be stupid for someone who is just starting and isn’t sure what he needs.

I bought a Kestrel. This is the fancy ballistics calculator they trained me on. It will save me a lot of aggravation when I shoot. I can set it for various cartridges and guns, and it will look at the weather, the distances, and a bunch of other things and tell me how to set my turrets. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. It should be, for what it costs.

Once all this stuff arrives, I will have no excuse for not shooting well, so I’ll have to start making some up.

There is a 900-yard range around 30 miles away. I have to go look at it. I expect to buy a membership.

If all goes well, I may be shooting the AR at home at 200 yards in less than a week, and I may be shooting at the range, using the Ruger, in less than two weeks. Within a month or two, I may be a minimally competent long-distance shooter. That would really be something. If I get confident, I’ll have to think seriously about traveling and hunting with guides.

I should go ahead and dump some of my guns. I hate selling a firearm, but now that I see how shooting is done, I realize some of my guns are silly. No one needs an overpriced Romanian semiauto Romak III. My K31 is neat, but the cheap ammo is no longer available, and the gun has a terrible stock. It’s like they mounted a barrel in an oak dresser. I like my LR-308, but who really needs a semiauto battle rifle in .308 Winchester? I could unload it and put the money in a hunting rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor.

Drinking the Creedmoor Kool-Aid seems to be a good thing. I used to think I wanted .260 Remington or 6.5 Swedish, but you make your life difficult when you pick those cartridges, and you don’t get much of a return. Creedmoor is a fantastic cartridge, and there is a ton of great factory ammo out there at reasonable prices. There is a reason why it’s so popular.

I could put a Creedmoor barrel in the LR-308. I don’t know why I should, though. I would be struggling to make a poorly chosen gun work.

I have a budget night scope on my .204 Ruger rifle. I don’t know if I should put an optical scope on it or not. I definitely want to keep the night scope, because it actually works, but I would also like to be able to use the rifle for daytime shooting at long range with a real scope.

If I start hunting deer, I will have to figure out what I need. Based on my sad experiences with coyotes (which never showed up), I know you want to be able to back the magnification down for anything large. When you try to spot a coyote with a 14x scope at 100 yards, all you see is a tiny bit of ground. He could be right next to it, and you wouldn’t know. If a coyote had shown up, I would have had a hard time keeping him in view as he moved. It must be worse with deer.

I have no criticisms of my pistol purchases. I think I did great there.

I’m going to buy a stockpile of Creedmoor ammo, and then I should be okay for the foreseeable future. If there is a Biden ammo panic, I’ll be okay for quite some time. Biden pretends he likes hunting, and the person who takes over when he forgets who he is will probably continue his dishonest gun policies, so hunting cartridges like 6.5 Creedmoor should be the last things to disappear. They’ll go after people who know the Second Amendment is for self-defense and resistance to tyranny, and after that, they’ll take duck guns and deer guns away from Fudds who really believed it was smart to vote for Democrats.

Spring was expensive, and summer is going to be expensive, too, but you have to spend money on very important things.