Jason_W
Member
It's true that on the whole, rifles are more accurate than shotguns and are better long distance tools, but given the manner in which a lot of people talk, you'd think that a shotgun in the deer woods is only a slight upgrade from a pointy stick.
I even have a coffee table book on the subject of shotgun hunting for deer by a man who has decades of experience doing just that who devotes a good deal of the forward to lamenting the hopeless inferiority of the shotgun.
I don't get it. Even I (who isn't that great a shot by any stretch) used to be able to keep slugs in a deer vital zone sized target at 100 yards using a smooth bore with ghost ring sights. It's not going to win any prizes, but it would mean venison.
Rifles will kill game at longer distances, true, and I wouldn't want a shotgun on a pronghorn hunt in Wyoming, but a lot of the hunting territory in this country is so thickly forested that a 50 yard shot on game is unusually long. Even in thick woods territory people look down on the shotgun. What gives?
I even have a coffee table book on the subject of shotgun hunting for deer by a man who has decades of experience doing just that who devotes a good deal of the forward to lamenting the hopeless inferiority of the shotgun.
I don't get it. Even I (who isn't that great a shot by any stretch) used to be able to keep slugs in a deer vital zone sized target at 100 yards using a smooth bore with ghost ring sights. It's not going to win any prizes, but it would mean venison.
Rifles will kill game at longer distances, true, and I wouldn't want a shotgun on a pronghorn hunt in Wyoming, but a lot of the hunting territory in this country is so thickly forested that a 50 yard shot on game is unusually long. Even in thick woods territory people look down on the shotgun. What gives?