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Mr. Anchorite is on target about the M-70 dominating HP competition for decades. One big reason for the 70's overwhelming popularity was that it was about the ONLY choice in finished, ready to shoot HP target rifles. When I first got into serious HP competition virtually everyone was shooting Winchester target rifles except for a few old timers who still used their tricked out '03 Springfields. Remington 700 Match rifles didn't even exist until the '70's and even then noone took them seriously. Even those of of us who had custom target rifles, they were built on Pre-64 M-70 actions, such as the three shown here. At top, a .300 Win Mag, I used in 1000 yd competitions, next a new era stock style and at bottom: my long time favorite built by rifle guru Roy Dunlap.
View attachment 894060 .
David Tubb won more of his across the course National Championships with M70's than any other type. And then he started experimenting with semi auto's, which did not feed reliably, than came up with the Tubb rifle. The M70 was a smooth and slick action and it had very few parts breakage. The firing pin was fast, ejection reliable with the claw extractor, but pre 64's got very expensive, and you could buy M40's direct from Remington that were guaranteed to shoot 1/2 MOA from the factory. Winchester walked away from the competitive shooting market, so to making a target M70 got to be more expensive.
And then the Space Gun (223 AR15's) finally developed into accurate and reliable target rifles. The AR had advantages, ammunition was cheap, feeding from a magazine was more reliable than a magazine well. Clipper strips jam and sometimes stack on the wrong side of the floorplate, causing the round on the top to roll off the action. Magazines are chunky, easy to grab, and easy to load into the lower of an AR. And the fact I did not have to roll around between rounds, working a bolt, was a huge advantage in rapid fire. I had more time to aim, and the X counts with rapid fire scores went up. At 600 yards the 223 had slightly inferior ballistics to a 168 SMK in a 308 Win. Hugely worse ballistics than any 6.5 or 7mm round. But you know, in across the course, you win the match standing slow fire and lose it at Long Range. High master 600 yard shooters are almost all within three points of each, they all clean the rapids, but scores vary widely in standing.
Evaluating an action solely on accuracy, and accuracy alone, you have to eliminate the human. When a human holds the rifle, his stock weld, trigger pull, sling tension, wind judgement, and flinch, greatly affects the precision and consistency of his score. The human error is typically orders of magnitude greater than mechanical errors. But, when you eliminate the human as much as possible, as the precision sports are doing, with huge bench rest type rifles, on expensive, geared mechanical rests, with electronic triggers, you might as well do your shooting from a computer screen and a keyboard.
But maybe that is the future. Time magazine states that
Pentagon: 7 in 10 Youths Would Fail to Qualify for Military Service but when you strip out the criminals from that statistic,
nearly one-third, 31 percent, of young people ages 17-24 are too overweight to qualify for military service. Being overweight or obese is the largest medical disqualifier, and the largest overall disqualifier when looking at young people who are ineligible for a single reason.
So, maybe the rifle of the future is not going to be hand held, because Americans are too rotund to shoot prone, too fat to shoot sitting without rolling backwards, or too weak to hold one off hand.