Busting the biggest myths about deer guns

Outdoor living shooting editor John B. Snow cut his teeth hunting in Michigan’s Northwoods in his youth. Now, all these years later, he lives in Bozeman, Montana, the beating heart of big game hunting in the West. He shoots in precision rifle competitions and is, quite frankly, a total nerd when it comes to long-range shooting.

So I’m counting on Snow to unite the two divided camps of deer hunters: those who hunt in the big woods with Grandpa’s old rifle versus those who hunt in the open field with the latest and greatest gear. We recently got together to discuss and dispel some of the biggest myths surrounding deer guns, cartridges, and shooting. As editors and deer hunters, we hear the following misconceptions all the time. This is why they are total BS

Myth No. 1: The 6.5 Creedmoor is an overrated deer cartridge

The 6.5 Creed isn’t really overrated or underrated, it’s just misunderstood. It’s not an ultra-fast, flat-shooting, physics-defying supercartridge as some proponents claim. Likewise, it’s not some squeaky cartridge that’s incapable of cleanly killing big game and is only popular because hipsters and metrosexuals think it’s cool.

In reality, the 6.5 Creed delivers projectiles with high ballistic coefficients from a cleverly designed case that embodies all the elements of modern cartridge design. While classic 6.5 cartridges can be modified to incorporate most of what the 6.5 Creedmoor has to offer, they are not capable of delivering the whole package. The fact is, we know more about designing a better cartridge than ballisticians have in decades. And the 6.5 Creedmoor’s track record in competition and in the field bears that out. After years of rigorous testing, it has been found to be an incredibly accurate cartridge overall.

“The 6.5 Creedmoor is an extremely capable big game round and is more than adequate for any whitetail trotting across North America,” says Snow, who has hunted and killed giant elk around the world with the 6.5 Creedmoor (which can weight 2,000 pounds). “It’s a wonderfully balanced and inherently precise round. It is easy to shoot, has relatively mild recoil, and it is also the type of cartridge that promotes and encourages people to practice and become better marksmen.

In other words, it is an ideal cartridge for medium-sized game such as white-tailed deer.

“Most people think of performance purely in terms of muzzle velocity,” says Snow. “They’ll say, ‘well, this cartridge spits out this bullet faster, therefore it performs better.’ But that’s not a very sophisticated way of looking at performance. There’s more to it than just muzzle velocity.”

Read next: Why small cartridges are so effective for big game

Myth #2: Shooting a boomer like the .300 Win. Mag. gives you the knockdown power you need for big whitetail bucks

“I’ve been guilty of using the term ‘knockdown power’ in the past, but that’s actually a misunderstanding of terminal ballistics,” says Snow. “There is no such thing as knock-down power with a cartridge.”

That’s because bullets only kill in two ways: they disable the central nervous system (a shot to the spine or brain), or through blood loss due to tissue damage (known as exsanguination).

“How the bullet behaves within the target and also where the bullet is placed in the target determines how effectively a bullet kills. The bullet doesn’t knock the animal down,” Snow says. “So when you start thinking about the ultimate effectiveness of a cartridge in those terms, it changes a little bit too. Bullets that are slightly smaller and propelled at moderate speeds can do as much damage, in some cases more, than a big boom.”

But what about that time you saw Grandpa drop that big 10-pointer with one shot of his old .30-06? Isn’t that downward force?

Actually not. Animals will fall for various reasons, but they will not be knocked over. Furthermore, every shooting scenario is unique. Sometimes a well-hit animal will run 100 yards before falling (even if it was hit by Grandpa’s old .30-06). These personal experiences in the field all serve as impactful anecdotes, helping to form strong opinions among hunters, but they are not actionable data.

Read next: Debunking the infamous myth of the gun’s knockdown power

Myth No. 3: Heavier .30 calibers are better at breaking brushstrokes

OL staff writer Tyler Freel did an in-depth test on the “brush-breaking bullets,” which you can read about here: The best brush-breaking bullets put to the test. His conclusions were quite simple: the .45-70 Govt. is by far the best round; and mono-metallic, copper bullets (such as Black Hills’ HoneyBadger) were deflected the least when shot through brush.

That said, all bullets are deflected to some extent. And since most deer hunters these days don’t shoot .45-70, none of us should be shooting through brush if we can avoid it.

“Except for very rare circumstances [like for a follow-up shot] we shouldn’t be shooting through brush at all,” says Snow. “It will deflect and possibly damage the bullet and introduce all kinds of chaos into the shot. Even with the .45-70, I wouldn’t get that first shot through the brush.”

Myth #4: The guns of our fathers, made in the 1950s and 1960s, are superior to today’s guns

They just don’t make guns like they used to, they make them much better.

“Look at the introduction of precision CNC machining, which is now commonplace in the weapons industry,” says Snow. “Companies, large and small, are allowed to manufacture barrels and actions so perfectly that you can literally buy the parts yourself, screw them together and have a really high-performing rifle. Whereas if you look at a classic 700 from back in the day, their ability to even check head spacing on the barrel was so poor that they had to try and mix and match a series of bolts to get it to close correctly the gauges they used to judge that the rifle does not meet specifications.”

But there’s one thing those old wood-loaded deer rifles got right: craftsmanship and hand control.

“One of the things we’re sad about is that we’ve lost some of the craftsmanship, especially in terms of checks and beautiful woods,” says Snow. “There are still high-end gunmakers who check very nicely, but it’s a bit of a dying art. With our modern weapons we don’t have the advantage of that because everything has gone towards synthetic materials or in some cases laminates. The checking as you see is often done by machine and it looks good, but you can see that it was done by machine.”

Myth #5: Choosing the perfect deer pattern is critical

Choosing the best deer cartridge used to be an important task. But these days, bullet selection is really more important than cartridge selection.

“People talk a lot about cartridge selection, and certainly back in the day – turning back the clock thirty or forty years – and we had a good variety of cartridges and a very minimal selection of bullets,” Snow says. “And for the most part, those bullets weren’t that good. Now we have our choice of these great bullets that have emerged over the last twenty years. So when we look at a hunting scenario, the bullet selection question really trumps the cartridge question. There are certain types of scenarios where one cartridge will outperform another, but when you strip down the extremes, it comes down to bullet selection. And we are fortunate that that is the case.”

Myth #6: Your deer rifle is worthless if it doesn’t shoot sub-MOA

Many rifle manufacturers promise “sub-MOA accuracy” out-of-the-box and some even send you a shot target with a group measuring less than an inch. But as Snow wrote last month, those sub-MOA guarantees don’t really mean much.

“I think the whole obsession with the targets and the sub-MOA thing has clouded the reality of what even competitive shooters need, let alone deer hunters,” says Snow. “Every year we shoot thousands of bullets through dozens of guns [for review of the best rifles]. We have our 5-shot group protocol, so we have a huge data set to look at. And really, with most shotguns and regular factory ammo, if it shoots 1.25 inch, 5-shot groups, it’s a damn good gun.

Furthermore, a gun is only as accurate as the hunter who shoots it. So spend less time worrying about the theoretical accuracy of your deer rifle, and more time practicing for better accuracy in the field.