Rifles

We liked the spirit of the Spirit Light-Weight, and mastered the Bushmaster Shorty, but at more than $2,300, the Wilson UT-15 Urban Tactical simply cost too much for us to recommend.

For serious big-game pursuits, the fit and functionality of Browning's easy-to-carry rifle outdid the Remington Model Seven SS and Ruger M77RL MKII models, in our opinion.

Can you get a decent, shootable rifle for $100 or less? Yes, if you use our tips to separate the wheat from the chaff.

If market trends are any indication, interest in long-range deer rifles has been growing in recent years. At least half a dozen of these products—essentially varmint rifles that are chambered for bigger calibers—are available now in production guns.

Previously, these products, which are designed to be used from a fixed position while hunting from some sort of stand, were available only as custom items for hunters who planned to use them for hunting beanfields in the southeastern United States, Texas's senderos, the western prairies of the U.S. and Canada, and powerline rights-of-way in the East.

This kind of hunting requires a flat-shooting, hard-hitting caliber in a rifle capable of superb accuracy under field conditions. Such rifles must be extremely accurate, incorporate a good trigger, and employ a properly designed stock.

At least three rifles purported to have these qualifications include the Winchester Model 70 Classic Laredo equipped with a BOSS, the Remington Model 700 Sendero SF (Stainless Fluted), and the Savage 110FP Tactical Rifle. We decided to test this trio head to head to see which one is worth your hard-earned dollars. All three rifles were chambered in .300 Winchester Magnum, one of the best long-range cartridges available in these rifles.

Cabela's gorgeous Henry and Cimarron's 1873 are cowboy-ready, but not so Winchester's 94AE—still, the latter does have its uses.

The $335 Thompson/Center 22 Classic is accurate, lightweight, and good looking—and much more affordable than the $950 Kimber Classic and $874 Sako Finnfire bolt guns.

However, Cabela's or Cimarron's less expensive versions of the 1874 Sharps will do until your $1,700 Shiloh Hartford Model arrives in a couple of years.

Yep, Remington's $1,999 EtronX works, and it's a clever idea packaged in a very accurate rifle. But you still might prefer the classic Ruger Varmint.

If as a serious hunter you've already got a good .375 H&H Magnum rifle, you may still need a really big rifle to complete your hunting battery. If you've got a good .416, you probably don't need any bigger rifle, and will have precious little need for a .375. That's the nature of the various .416s. They'll do pretty much what the biggest .458 Winchester Magnum and larger rifles (large bores) do with less recoil, and will also do everything the smaller rifles (medium bores) do, but you'll get kicked harder.

The oldest of the .416s is the .416 Rigby, introduced in 1911 by John Rigby & Co. The .416 Rigby cartridge looks extremely modern, with its sharp shoulder and barely tapered case. The Rigby was designed to be an all-purpose, heavy-caliber rifle for the man who wanted to hunt Africa with a bolt-action rifle. Before the Rigby round was introduced, serious hunters who needed powerful rifles used large-bore single shots or double rifles. There were no large-caliber cartridges for bolt-action rifles. John Rigby ensured his ammunition was loaded with excellent bullets, including a superb steel-jacketed "solid" for elephant. Also, the workmanship on his rifles was as good as it gets. The rifles and ammunition performed admirably, and the result was that the .416 Rigby soon achieved a stellar reputation in Africa. The availability of repeat shots over the then-common single shots for about the same cost, and the much lower cost of the Rigby over a comparable double rifle also helped Rigby's sales.

Wood is alive. Wood absorbs moisture. Wood warps. Wood breaks. Because wood is wood, its economically impractical to manufacture wooden gun stocks in quantity that will fit a barrelled-action precisely when the two are merely screwed together. Such precision and the accuracy it achieves can only be accomplished by the hands of a skilled stockmaker that means big bucks.

Synthetics are dead, dont warp, weigh about the same as wood and are far less susceptible to outside influences. While there are many kinds of wood, each with its own characteristics, there are basically two categories of synthetic materials used to manufacture stocks: fiberglass and thermoplastic.

With fiberglass, h...

We talked with Judge Roy Bean the other day. The one we spoke with had nothing to do with holding court, hanging strangers at a whim or running a frontier saloon named The Jersey Lily. He and seven others shot an IPSC match with black powder revolvers back in 1979, giving birth to the Single Action Shooting Society, over which Judge Bean now presides.

The S.A.S.S. eventually begat Cowboy Action Shooting, and the rest is history in the making. No other shooting sport is growing as fast. It got a foothold in California, moved into Arizona, then Texas, is presently spreading rapidly through Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia and doubling the number of active participants nationwide every 12-1...

Remember that daylight bank robbery in California a few months back? The bad guys were illegally armed to the teeth, wearing body armor and spraying lead in all directions. If there had been a movie crew around, one might have thought they were filming Lethal Weapon 4.

If you saw the TV news coverage, the image of one armored bandit being dropped in his tracks will probably stay with you a long time. That shot was taken with a rifle capable of MOA (minute of angle) accuracy at 100 yards. In the hands of law enforcement, they're called sniper rifles. The rest of us call them target or varmint rifles. Except for finish and perhaps some high tech, highly expensive add-on optics, they're muc...