One of the things I learned was that you should not own both 270 and 308 rifles in the same household. And there's good reason for this. It is possible to chamber a 308 into a 270 rifle and actually fire that primer because the round will seat far enough back to close the bolt. The bullet is too big for the barrel. If you do that, the bullet will jam, the pressure will exceed the tolerances of the chamber, and the rifle will explode like a grenade in your face, or vent 65Kpsi gasses into the magazine if you're lucky.
Here in the Western states, you can have a 308 if you really want to, but you're giving up about 100 yards of reach from a lighter and faster round like the 270, which has about the same recoil and is just about Ideal across the Western states, with 400 yard ranges being common. In most cases, you can glass your animal (see them with binoculars) from miles off and have to drive by jeep to get closer, then walk in closer yet, and hope you were careful enough not to be noticed. The West is a mix of big, wide, open spaces, and craggy chapparal with heavy brush and steep canyons, usually with water, where the game goes to drink or sleep. The predators of the west include bears and mountain lions and coyotes. There's also feral pigs and feral dogs. Most ranchers in the West, outside California, build their fences on A-frames with a 30 inch gap underneath two strands of wire. Calves can get out, but they mostly come back because their mother is on the other side with the milk. They leave this huge gap because Antelope, galloping along at 45 mph all day, have learned to slide under fences at 30 mph, then back up and accelerate to 45 again. I have personally seen this along I-80 in Wyoming.
I also learned that if you want an accurate rifle, you can't buy ammunition, and if you do buy it, the worst is military surplus, and the worst of the military surplus is USSR soviet era steel cased ammo. Their loads were go-bang, with a grain of powder variation meaning from round to round you'd get 3 inches of drop or rise. Low quality bullets meant you'd get 10 inches side to side in the low quality go-bang barrels. They go off, but they aren't accurate, so having a Soviet caliber rifle is really just admission of ignorance and lack of practice to realize it won't hit what it aims at. And if you want to accurize a Soviet bloc weapon? It costs as much as a new in the box accurized Springfield M1-A which has better quality ammo to start with. And that's not the most cost effective either.
A bolt action Remington 770 is $350 new in box, with scope included. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have bothered with most of the rifles I shot, and would have just gotten a .270 Winchester, loaded my own match grade ammo, and called it good. Would have saved me a couple grand and I'd be confident in a single rifle I could shoot well in all conditions for all reasonable game in the Western USA out to 350 yards. Including Coyotes using 120 grain bullets. That plus a phone to let the rancher know I popped one on his land as I was passing by and picked up the carcass for the bounty, still offered in most Western states. This is considered good manners, you see, and your civic duty. A 130 grain bullet is best for longer shots, and 140 or 150 for elk or bear, if you must. The Spanish in Cuba when Teddy Roosevelt was fighting them were armed with 7x57 Mauser rifles, which is what convinced the American military to dump the .45-70 and take up a flat shooting accurate rifles after a couple centuries of "More Power Argh ar ar!". Turns out there's no points for missing except in horseshoes and hand grenades.
In the real world buying ammo is buying uncertainty and buying inaccuracy. Loading your own ammo is the better option for accuracy because it is higher quality. It's not particularly difficult to do it well, and there are videos showing how. A properly attentive hobbyist can do this, though making large numbers of it can be a bit of a drudge, and I don't recommend multi-stage press setups. Those just give you more moving parts to fail. A simple single stage press is best for best quality ammunition and most accurate shots.
In the real world, semi-auto actions are loose so they function reliably, and looseness = inaccuracy. A bolt action can be tight and thus accurate. Semi-auto also has a gas pressure function curve, so they only work well in a specific range of pressures. Too low or too high and it won't cycle or can be damaged. This is one of the many flaws in the AR-15 platform. The round itself is accurate and light recoil, but I find it works best in a bolt action. So do most people with anti-predator rifles or ground squirrel rifles chambered in it. As ground squirrel burrows are known to break the legs of cattle or horses, many ranchers try to control their populations. If sufficient raptors are available, they do the job without trouble, but during the 90's, when raptor numbers were very low due to DDT etc, ranchers would shoot squirrels and groundhogs. Mall Ninja survivalists buy AR-15s not knowing about its pressure-cycling limitations, and not realizing that the round is less than ideal for eating what you shoot. The bullet fragments, and you have to cut well away from the wound to avoid ingesting bullet fragments which would tear up your guts and maybe kill you.
In the real world, Hollywood Rifle Shots are only in the movies. In the real world, to make a long shot you have to know your ammo, shoot 60-100 rounds per day in your caliber without flinching, have a heavy (extra thick and heavy) air gauged barrel and a very solid precise lockup of the bolt to the receiver so the round has no play and no pressure variation on firing attached to a heavy stock, with a serious rest and probably weighing over 13 pounds, which is a LOT much for field carry. And the barrel needs to be stress relieved so it will heat and cool without warping, which usually means Stainless Steel won't work unless it is extra high quality which means cubic money in price. You also have to make match grade hand loaded ammunition, including checking the projectiles for flaws under a microscope, weigh and batch based on weight, do concentricity checks and spin checks, and run QC with a velocity meter you fire the rifle through for muzzle velocity. That is a lot of work. That is what it actually takes to make a Hollywood rifle shot like in the movies. Few SWAT tearms have that kind of time or money, and most just aim center of mass and live with the consequences. While professional designated marksmen can shoot .300 Winchester Magnum well enough to justify this, most people can't take its 35 pound recoil 60 times a day. And most people can't justify spending $10K on a rifle to get that sort of potential precision. In the real world, you use a smaller caliber with less recoil, make your loads as best you can, test fire and map the results, and you aim center of mass and hope for the best. And whenever possible, get closer to the target while hunting. Taking really long shots when you can get closer is bad sportsmanship.
Another thing I learned in shooting is that military rifles are utter crap. They are made to "go bang" but they have rough edges, they rattle, and they aren't accurate. Military guns are made by the low bidder. They aren't quality. They are quality controlled to a specification agreed on by a committee staffed by number crunchers, not by soldiers. They are based on volume of fire and to give the soldier on the ground confidence while the REAL guns are being pointed downrange and loaded: the belt fed machine guns. Rather than spend $10K on a single shot, they spend $5K on many shots. It is cost effective and scary to the other guy. In the real world, you hit the dirt behind something really solid when you hear the machinegun blast away. That's what real rifle troops carry. Belt fed. Everybody else is distraction and guards for the machine gun, which has the highest hit rate and actually makes the other side duck. The only other guys that matter are the radio man, who calls in the air strike while the machine gunner keeps the enemy pinned down, and the designated marksman, who shoots the other guy's machine gunner from behind better cover. The marksman, the machine gunner, and the radioman are the primary targets in an ambush, which is how modern wars are fought on the ground. This is how it is in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Syria. It has been like this since Vietnam, and probably since the latter part of WW2 and Korea. Reliable air strikes coordinated with ground attacks are really efficient. Far better than Tanks, for instance. Many ground troops carry anti-tank weapons, but few carry anti-aircraft weapons, and attack helicopters usually shoot from 2-5 miles away with guided missiles. That's real military operations. AR-15s? Those are a security blanket for the walking target on the ground.
In hunting, there's also this fantasy that there's unlimited elk, mostly by people who don't hunt and don't know just how few there are. In the real world, there just isn't that much big game and there's a lottery for elk tags and getting a tag gives you the Right to hunt a mature bull elk, but not a cow elk or an immature bull so you'd better have proper identification of your animal and a backstop behind it. Elk are known to run a dozen miles over mountains when scared, and can go that far when injured too. And you're honor bound to give chase. If you don't, you don't just lose your license. You are looking at $150K in fines and possibly jail. Lose your house kind of trouble. Hunting is a last resort.
This is a reason I am in favor of fully stocking streams with fish. Fishing is more efficient and there's nobody getting shot from missed targets and bad backstops and most of a fish is edible and easy to carry out. They also cut down on the malaria mosquitos and don't have buzzing parasites jumping all over you after the animal dies and you're butchering it, a HUGE downside to hunting and the one that actually put me off the whole thing entirely. Fishing well requires effort and skill, but in a stream with a lot of fish, you eat better than hunting. Just be sure to have butter to keep up your fat levels.
If you want meat, don't hunt. Cows are more efficient at converting grass into protein and farmers sell them. Same with chickens. And rabbits. Pay the nice farmer. Stop wandering around the woods when people are shooting.
Hunting season often coincides with pot-harvest season, and the pot farmers shoot at "trespassers" who blunder into their fields of often-illegal pot. That's a big downside to posting ideas on survivalist techniques to the public. The pot farmers read this. They're mostly off the grid and use this advice in the real world. I wonder just how many readers are pot farmers.
While there's very limited elk, there's still lots of deer, which don't taste good, and antelope, which are adults able to reproduce at 1 and a half years old and die of old age at 5 years old. They're like rabbits. Feel free to eat those. They are supposed to taste good, and there's a major preserve in South-Eastern Oregon, in the lake country east of Klamath Lakes. Cows have more meat on them, and someone else butchers them.
Get good at cooking all sorts of cuts of beef and making chicken taste good and ways to use eggs in dishes and you'll be more cost effective with your protein. Learn your techniques, your seasonings, your sauces and methods and you'll never have to worry if you accidentally shoved a .308 round into a .270 rifle.
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