- Well, orange you glad you joined me? Well, you know what this means? Summer is on the wane and deer season is just around the corner. Well it's a little closer than
it was last week at any rate. Hey, if you haven't picked out
your rifle and ammunition yet you might want to get started. It's not as easy to run
down to the hardware store and pick up a box of your
favorite ammo these days. So on this episode of
"Ron Spomer Outdoors," we're going to talk about
choosing the perfect deer rifle. And this doesn't mean we're
gonna say there's one rifle that's absolutely perfect. We are going to investigate
how any deer hunter should select amongst the various deer cartridges we all love. Stay tuned. (upbeat guitar music) Okay, before we dive into the
cartridges, I want to, again, invite you to join us on Patreon. Our patrons help support this programming, and we really appreciate
that kind of support. So if you've got a chance
and would like to help out, just go to patreon.com
and RonSpomerOutdoors, and we thank you. Now, rifle cartridges for
deer, it is often argued, pretty much always argued every time I do a video
on these cartridges, somebody will say, "They all kill deer." Why be so picky and so fussy
and thinking about ballistics and trajectories and BC
bullets, just get a .30-30, it's absolutely the best. Well, I will agree that the .30-30 is a heck of a deer rifle, but so is the .300 Win Mag. And for some people, the .223 Remington. There is a broad field of
cartridges that are used for hunting white tail deer and mule deer. So what is the best cartridge?
Well, there really isn't one. What you have to determine is what is best for your style of hunting. How do you hunt? Where do you hunt? What's the terrain like? How far do you want to reach out? There's a big difference
between sitting in a blind, looking over a small corner field where your longest shot might be 50 yards than there is in hiking
in the mountains out west and maybe shooting across
a canyon at a big mule deer at three and 400 yards. So yeah, your .30-30 is
not gonna be so effective out in the west. But then again, there are hunters who prefer
the thrill of the chase, the challenge of stalking
and getting closer. And for them, the .30-30 might work just because they want
that extra challenge. Covey, I don't remember
inviting you up here. Why don't you come over
and say hi to everybody? Come on, come here, girl, come on over. Stand up where everybody can
see you. Yeah, there you go. Come on, get up there. Not gonna work. You better go downstairs where you belong 'cause you're just going
to get in trouble up here. You're going to interrupt
this whole program, okay? You can't do any tricks for us. Nothing? Okay. See you around buddy. Go, go. She's heard you say you kind of like her, so now she's trying to sneak
into every video we do. So where was I? Well, okay. Talking about selecting
the right cartridge and rifle for you. So I wrote down, just jogged
some quick notes down here, on what we want to look for in
a cartridge for deer hunting. We're already talking
about range and reach, so that's going to determine a lot of it. Another point that a lot of folks bring up is meat waste. You know, you shoot with
a high velocity cartridge or something really big, and
you might waste a lot of meat from the damage of that
high velocity shot. So you might want to consider that. The lower the velocity
and the heavier the bullet and the stouter the bullet, the less extraneous damage
you will get on impact. Then again, there's the argument
that I would rather lose five pounds of meat off the shoulder than lose the whole animal because it wasn't an effective
cartridge or bullet. Okay. There's good arguments
on both sides of that. Another one of course is their trajectory. And as we said, if you're out
west where you might have to shoot a long way, or even back east over big open fields, the bean fields and big
cornfields these days, you're gonna want a little more reach. So yeah, the .30-30 is
plenty good enough for terminating a deer, but can you reach it? And that's where the
arguments for things like the .300 Win Mag come into play. It's not because, oh, we
think we need that big, heavy bullet going 3200 feet per second and all that sort of stuff. It's the ability to reach a distance and then still have enough energy. So that's what people are thinking about. And on that topic, I've got
to bring up this big guy. This is the .300 Remington Ultra Magnum. This is getting up there towards the top of the velocity realm
for a .308 cartridge. And I had a gentleman at one
of the shows I was doing, a deer hunting show, and he said, "Yeah, I was tired of having
to look for my deer sometimes "when I shot him, so I stepped
up the power from my .30-30 "to a .30-06. And that
still wasn't quite right, "so I thought I'm just gonna
go to that .300 Ultra Magnum "and anchor every deer right there." So in the interest of accuracy, I said, "Well, how did that work for you?" He said, "Well, the
first year I took it out, "had a doe step out at
around 100, 125 yards "at the end of a swamp there. "And I took my shot and
she ran back into the swamp "and I never did find her." So, so much for the high velocity, heavy bullet routine working every time. That's the point, you
just can't count on them always working all the time. But then I can remember when I was a kid on my first deer hunt in the
Black Hills of South Dakota, beautiful snowy day in the Pines. I mean, it was like a
magic Christmas card time. And I had a .30-30 model 94 Winchester, I thought I was one of
the big guys, you know, grown up with a real rifle, oh boy. And here comes another kid
in the group shooting this. I said, "What is that little thing?" He said, "It's a .222." I said, "Is that legal?" I didn't think .22s were legal for deer. I didn't even know what a .222 was. And it turns out it was. And there are a lot of
people who take deer cleanly with the .222 Remington,
as well as the .223. But in some states they aren't even legal. So what's going on? Then I know guys who
insist that the .45-70 is what you need for
white tail. Oh my God, you're throwing 300, 400
grain bullets with that thing. So once again, they all work, yes, but are they all going to do the job for where you hunt and how you hunt? So some of the other things
we're going to consider in choosing our gun and
our cartridges is recoil. A lot of folks just
don't like heavy recoil, so you have to step down a little bit. And that's where the
.223s and the .22-250s and the old .257 Roberts, great cartridge for deer
hunting with very little recoil. These days, that little 6.5
Grendel is really starting to strike a chord with a lot of
recoil sensitive shooters. Because it'll shoot 120, 130 grain bullet, and it's not hyper fast, but
for out to 200, 250 yards, it more than carries the mail. And a lot of folks are just loving it because there's hardly any recoil. That, I think, is what
made the .243 and the .244, or six millimeter Remington, so popular in the late fifties and into the sixties. They were a dual purpose rifle, you could use them for
hunting deer and pronghorn. A few folks will use them for elk. I don't think it's ideal,
but they get the job done. But for deer, that just really proved to be an effective cartridge. Those are light recoiling ones that you might want to consider. I've taken a lot of deer with the .243s and I've never had any reason to complain. So then there's cost and availability. And plenty of folks are
concerned about that, especially now. If you get an odd cartridge, you might not find the
ammunition and you'll have a harder time finding
a rifle chamber for it. So you do have to consider
what kind of a rifle you enjoy shooting; pump
action, auto-loading, lever action, bolt action,
all kinds of 'em out there, that might determine what
your choices could be. Ethics and aesthetics and tradition. And there are a lot of folks
who hunt deer for more reasons than just shooting the deer. It's the whole experience that
ties it all together for them and makes it almost a spiritual
connection to the outdoors. And I'll have to confess to
some of that myself, you know, as much as I enjoy the physical
challenge and the meat, of course, and just being
a successful hunter, the older I get, the more
I enjoy the aesthetics of the whole experience. And for a lot of people that
means not just using any rifle, but using dad's rifle,
or your brother's rifle, or your uncle's or someone who
left you a special heritage or tradition, you know, and it might go back to that
first rifle you shot as a kid. You might pull it out of the closet, blow the dust off of it,
and rediscover a thrill that you didn't realize was still there. So there are a lot of things to consider in your deer rifles. Please don't say, "Ah,
they're all the same. "They all kill deer as
long as you hit them." Yeah, of course. But some of them make it more
fun to go after the deer, they make it easier to reach
out and put that bullet where you know it needs
to go, and some of them are more affordable and easily obtainable. There are just lots of things to consider when you're picking your
absolute best deer rifle. So choose carefully and hunt
honest and shoot straight. (upbeat guitar music)
