“It’s better to go broke at the range than it is to make a fortune in the shop.”*--Christopher Self, Alabama machinist, designer and rifle nut.

Last week, I got a further lesson on the folly of attempting shots at long range without actually testing your equipment beforehand. Shooting at 300 yards, a 165-grain polymer-tipped bullet which had shot splendidly at 100 and 200 yards turned in a group with a vertical spread of 7 inches. There was no horizontal dispersion at all, but the slugs were all over the place up- and down-wise.

According to some balistically sophisticated friends of mine, there are three possible causes:

1. The polycarbonate tips melted off by the time they got to 300 yards and caused variations in the bullets’ flight.

2. The bullets were stabilized at 100 and 200 but by the time they reached 300 their loss of velocity destabilized them.

3. Satan.

I saw a similar occurrence with a .300 Weatherby Magnum which shot handloads using Norma MRP very accurately at long range. When the MRP ran out, I worked up a load with RelodeR 22 which gave about 50 fps less velocity and nearly identical accuracy. At 100 and 200, fine. At 300, all over the target. I think that missing 50 fps was responsible, or maybe it was Lucifer.

Bulllets do odd things at different ranges. I am reminded of Ross Seyfried’s .300/416 wildcat, Miss America, which was built by Ultra Light Arms. At 100 yards it was all the gun could do to shoot 4-inch groups, but at a measured mile it put five shots in a group you can cover with your hand.

*This has nothing to do with shooting at long range, but I liked it so much I pass it along to you. And of course Chris is right.

We never saw bald eagles when I was kid, but they’re a common sight along the Iowa River now that they no longer feed on DDT-laced fish and lead-poisoned waterfowl. While a lot of hunters will disagree with me, I really believe lead bans are not secret back-door attacks on guns and hunting but are acts of genuine, well-intentioned concern for the environment.

To the guy on the street, a lead ban is a no brainer: lead is toxic, we banned it in paint and gasoline, we may as well get rid of lead bullets, too, especially since there are green alternatives. Our guy on the street neither knows nor cares that non-toxic requirements raise the cost of hunting.

That said, any increase in price – even a $1 rise in hunting license fees – prices some hunters out of the field. Complex regulations and restrictions drive casual hunters from the sport as well.

The latest lead ban, in California, is supposed to protect the endangered California condor. As this column by Jim Matthews, who hunts all over the Golden State, points out, no matter what the intention of lead bans, they wind up forcing hunters out of the field.

Judging by the number of replies, my recent rant against the painful recoil of 3.5-inch lead turkey loads touched a nerve, so to speak. Some of you wondered about the recoil of shotgun slugs by comparison. The answer to that question is, there is no comparison. Shotgun slugs kick, but they can’t touch a 3.5-inch turkey load when it comes to bringing the hurt.

Nevertheless, perhaps because we aim slugs even more carefully than we do turkey loads, we (I anyway) feel their recoil, which is not insignificant. I can remember when 3-inch slugs first came out and a friend of mine who was a recoil nut bought some. He sat down cross-legged, elbows on his knees and let fly. The first shot rolled him right onto his back. “Want to try it?” he asked with a crazed grin on his face.

“No,” I said.

Not long ago, I broke the reticle of a very nice scope with slug recoil, and I’ve been saved from a couple of scope cuts over the years only by my shooting glasses.

Since the question is, how do slugs stack up in the recoil department, I dissected a sampling of slugs, weighed the parts, and crunched some numbers with a recoil calculator. From crunching my own shoulder, I would have picked Remington Buckhammers and Winchester Partition Golds as the hardest kicking. Interestingly, they tied. Both the heavier, slower Remingtons and the lighter, faster Partition Golds generated 47 foot pounds of recoil in an 8-pound gun.

Although that’s nearly a third less recoil than a 3.5 inch turkey load, it’s a few foot-pounds more than a 300-grain bullet at  2600 fps in a  10-pound  .375 H&H.  The 1700 fps, 1 ounce Winchester Power Point – an Old School Foster-type slug – only managed 35 foot-pounds of recoil; a punch in the shoulder if you’re shooting from a bench but a love-tap in the field.

I didn’t have a 3-inch Lightfield Hybred to cut up, but based on its specs (1 1/ 4 ounce slug, plus sabot, at 1730 fps) it should be the slug recoil champion, kicking almost as hard as  .458 Win Mag.

Since deer aren’t very big and eat only a few people a year, why put up with so much recoil to kill them when lighter, slower loads will kill them equally dead? There is the matter of flatter trajectory for “long range” shooting (anything over 100 yards is long range with a slug)  but I’ll give the last word to Randy Fritz, who makes the supremely accurate Tar-Hunt shotgun and shoots Lightfields out of it. I asked him once why he felt the need to endure the recoil of fast, heavy slugs. “I hunt in Pennsylvania,” he said. “The woods are so crowded here if I have to trail a deer at all, I’ll find somebody else gutting it. I want something that knocks them flat.”

It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.