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The Politics Of War • For those that say a .223 won't kill.

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If you’d told me four years ago that I’d be sitting in the woods near my home in Alaska, hoping for a big-boar grizzly to come to bait, and planning to take it with an ultra-light AR rifle chambered in .223 Wylde, I wouldn’t have dismissed it out of hand. If you knew me, you’d understand. However, I definitely would have had my doubts. Yet, that’s exactly where I found myself sitting in the fading light in a spruce forest, listening to mosquitoes, red squirrels and gray jays, waiting for the boar we’d caught on the game camera a couple of days prior with that exact rifle sitting next to me. Hours passed and nothing bigger than a magpie stirred. I’d already decided to call it and head home at 9:30, and that time was getting close. It was looking like today wasn’t going to be the day to test this idea. You might be wondering how this crazy idea of hunting a grizzly with a heavy-for-caliber .223 Wylde came about in the first place, but I really can’t take credit for that part. For a couple of years, I’d been following an online discussion of guys using the .223 Rem. with heavy-for-caliber match bullets for big game up to and including elk. On the surface, that sounds crazy at worst and irresponsible at best. The conversation started with far more naysayers than proponents. However, as time went on and more people tried it, and posted pictures of terminal performance, including through elk shoulders, on par with much larger chamberings, the naysayer-to-proponent ratio shifted dramatically. The results speak for themselves.A couple of months later, I shouldered a just-completed three pound, one ounce .223 Wylde for the first time, and frankly, it was mind blowing. It was so light it felt like a BB gun. I started to refer to it as the “Red Ryder.” A couple of weeks later, the rifle lay on my pack high on an alpine slope, with a boar black bear at 350 yards in the scope. Immediately following my shot, I heard the hit, and in seconds the boar was tumbling down the mountain, hanging up in some thick willows about 100 yards below. The little .223 worked as advertised. The shot, placed exactly as I would have with my .308, killed just like my .308 would have, but with less recoil and almost two pounds less to carry up that mountain. What’s more, in my 30 years of hunting bears in Alaska, generally harvesting at least two bears per year, that was the second longest shot I’ve taken, and it killed so fast there was no time for a follow up shot.After my experience with the 77-gr. TMK and its terminal performance, I had exactly zero doubt it will kill a grizzly with a correctly placed broadside shot. I’ve killed a lot of bears, and as I say, hit ‘em right, and they’re not tough. Hit ‘em wrong, and they are. The bullet and its placement are the key. But what would happen if you had to take a frontal shot on a bear with that .223? Well, I was hoping to answer that question, with a sample of one anyway.
Last I looked a bear was a lot tougher than a human!

statistics: Posted by Rebcop3:51 AM - 1 day ago — Replies 0 — Views 51



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