RoadWild, There's been a lot of good advice here on building the rifle you want. And some excruciatingly polite responses on taking game at 700 yards. Let me play bad cop here.
Don't even THINK about taking a shot like that, EVER. Some of the learned here have cautioned you about wind drift, steady holds, deflection angles, and range finding. They haven’t even touched yet on terminal ballistics of bullets intended to behave a certain way (humanely) on game at far shorter distances than what you propose. They are trying to tell you something.
I'm hoping not a single one of these assumptions about you is true: You're a Marine Sniper wannabe; you've spent hours playing World of Warcraft; you've never been on a serious extended hunt in your life; you’ve watched animal snuff videos on YouTube; you’ve never maimed, wounded, or tracked an animal you’ve shot, small game included.
Let me offer a pretty mild account of a long range shot gone bad, written by Jack O’Connor, quoted from The Hunter’s Shooting Guide.
“Legitimate shooting at long range requires, first of all, the rather poorly distributed commodity called judgment, something which many of us, alas, do not have. Before a rifleman takes a pop at an animal beyond his sure hitting range, he should pause and ask himself what will happen if he wounds the beast. Once I was riding back toward camp with a trigger-happy character when we saw a big bull moose, with enormous snowy-white antlers, standing on the far side of a muskeg meadow. He was about 400 yards away and right at the edge of heavy timber. This citizen jumped off his horse and before you could say “glockenspiel” he had fired offhand. I heard the plunk of the bullet on the water filled stomach, and the bull faded into the timber. We found no blood, but we did find some hairs cut off by the bullet. We tracked the bull about a quarter of a mile but it grew dark back in the timber and we had to return to our horses and ride to camp. As far as I could see our boy suffered no remorse. But all he’d done was donate some meat to the wolves.”
I’m not suggesting you’d take that shot, or that you’re the kind of person O’Connor portrays. But this is serious . . . stuff. Keep talking and reading, and endure the blunt force trauma of old guys like me. But please, don’t ever aspire to 700-yard shots on any creature. Thank you.
Respectfully,
Ross Bellingham
Don't even THINK about taking a shot like that, EVER. Some of the learned here have cautioned you about wind drift, steady holds, deflection angles, and range finding. They haven’t even touched yet on terminal ballistics of bullets intended to behave a certain way (humanely) on game at far shorter distances than what you propose. They are trying to tell you something.
I'm hoping not a single one of these assumptions about you is true: You're a Marine Sniper wannabe; you've spent hours playing World of Warcraft; you've never been on a serious extended hunt in your life; you’ve watched animal snuff videos on YouTube; you’ve never maimed, wounded, or tracked an animal you’ve shot, small game included.
Let me offer a pretty mild account of a long range shot gone bad, written by Jack O’Connor, quoted from The Hunter’s Shooting Guide.
“Legitimate shooting at long range requires, first of all, the rather poorly distributed commodity called judgment, something which many of us, alas, do not have. Before a rifleman takes a pop at an animal beyond his sure hitting range, he should pause and ask himself what will happen if he wounds the beast. Once I was riding back toward camp with a trigger-happy character when we saw a big bull moose, with enormous snowy-white antlers, standing on the far side of a muskeg meadow. He was about 400 yards away and right at the edge of heavy timber. This citizen jumped off his horse and before you could say “glockenspiel” he had fired offhand. I heard the plunk of the bullet on the water filled stomach, and the bull faded into the timber. We found no blood, but we did find some hairs cut off by the bullet. We tracked the bull about a quarter of a mile but it grew dark back in the timber and we had to return to our horses and ride to camp. As far as I could see our boy suffered no remorse. But all he’d done was donate some meat to the wolves.”
I’m not suggesting you’d take that shot, or that you’re the kind of person O’Connor portrays. But this is serious . . . stuff. Keep talking and reading, and endure the blunt force trauma of old guys like me. But please, don’t ever aspire to 700-yard shots on any creature. Thank you.
Respectfully,
Ross Bellingham
