Reloading and Marksmanship

I used to be a rifle marksman. I enjoyed it. It was a technical skill, and helped me deal with my diabetes, which makes you shake from your sugars going up and down all the time. It isn't nice, but having something to focus on helps. In more modern times I'd recommend a driving simulator. That takes steady hands and requires smooth reactions and eye-hand coordination too.

Anyway, I got into the hobby, quickly realized that factory ammo is mostly bad, milsurp ammo is often really terrible, and accuracy comes from consistency, which you can only really get if you make your own ammo. Good news there. The press is cheap, around $120. You need primers and powder (the correct one) and a reloading manual is a good idea. The big surprise I found was that the manual points out that you don't have to load to the highest pressure to get a safe and accurate load. I studied lots of reloading data from Reloadbench, which only exists as archives now. It was a useful place though, and the two reloading manuals I used to stare at helped. While shooting .22LR is a good starting point, for what is a glorified pellet gun, when you get to a calibers with replaceable primers like 223 and 308, you learn more. For one thing, .223 is finicky. You get huge differences in accuracy from very small differences in powder, 0.2 grain. Larger calibers don't get much change in accuracy from that, but .223 does. I learned a lot of precision from .223. And I learned to respect the caliber, and its limitations. For instance, when some mall ninja tells me his 15 inch barrel air gauge stainless steel CQC model AR-15 will hit targets 3 inches across at 600 yards with .223 with a full magazine I am certain he is full of p00p. Here's all the problems with that.

1. You need a 69 grain bullet to hit at that range, which means you need a 1:7 twist, 
2. You need at least a 22-inch barrel to get full velocity out of the round. 
3. A 69-75 grain bullet in a 15 inch barrel is under 2000 feet per second, and won't get full terminal velocity effects, much less avoid serious rainbow-drop issues at even modest ranges. 
4. Stainless steel warps from heat, so you can't maintain point of aim after a couple rounds, nevermind 16-20. 
5. AR-15s have inperfect lockup, meaning that chamber pressures vary, meaning that from the first round to the last the tolerances are different, meaning you aren't getting consistency, meaning changing velocity round to round, and poor accuracy at range. 

My .223 was bolt action. It was a 24 inch heavy barrel. It gave very consistent accuracy, but I also notice that heat would still warp the carbon steel barrel, which is inherently more accurate than stainless steel. I didn't have an air gauged barrel. I couldn't afford that. I also didn't have a precision rifle action and gunsmithing. Those are $10K, realistically. One of the things you learn from precision shooting is you can get more finicky, and spend cubic money, and eventually get nearly as good as you want, but Hollywood Rifle Shots are fantasy, created by directors with no firearms experience. Becoming a rifle marksman ruined all Hollywood movies with snipers in them. All of them. 

The pinnacle of long distance civilian rifle marksmanship is at Black Rock Lake, same location as Burning Man, different date. They shoot .338 Lapua, 416 Super something or other, and .50 Browning, which is the precision version of the heavy machinegun round from WW2. Turns out you can load that for 2 miles. But the target area is 15 feet wide. And that's the realistic error. There's too many breezes and spin and concentricity and flexing errors that can screw up your aim. Everything after it leaves the muzzle is environmental  and metal distortion from the projectile, so the end result is a huge target area. Not people sized. There are some amazing shots at ridiculous 1.5 mile ranges, but there's a lot of luck involved to hit a human sized target. Luck and cubic money in the various components of accuracy. 

If I had kids, old enough, I'd teach them reloading and give them the experience to understand the absolute and infallible limitations of marksmanship, so they'd learn how to spot the BSers, the madmen, the loons and mall ninjas who insist their tiny CQC carbine is not, despite their claims, a 600 yard super-hollywood equalizer with magic beans power. Any time I hear an advertisement that claims their magnets with copper cladding can cure achy joints and venereal disease, I just call that Magic Beans and turn my attention elsewhere. It is the right answer to crazy.