Thinking About Rifles - Comments

Useful comments from this series, and I appreciate the input.  Let's look at a couple of them, and not get ahead of ourselves.

Anonymous comments:

All the above maybe true BUT it does not allow for those the shoot from the bench for small groups because they enjoy it.
Not al shooting has to be to prepair for the field or for self defence. Lots of people shoot just for the pleasure of shooting.

That's true and I'm not trying to put anyone down, nor denigrate the benchrest game.  Bench shooters have taught us a lot about accurate shooting over the past couple of decades, and I regularly surf Accurate Shooter to look at the latest trends.   There are wonderful things that the bench shooters have taught us over the years and I appreciate their efforts.

Joel says:

I believe - could be wrong - that it was Cooper who dismissed DA/SA pistols as 'a brilliant solution to a nonexistent problem.' History seems to have applied the same putdown to the Scout Rifle concept.

Yep, that's what Cooper said and you may be right that history will be the death knell of the Scout rifle concept.    That's yet to be seen.  Note that I'm not talking about Scout rifles, but I'm using a term of the practical rifle.    That's undefined as yet, and this is as much a problem I'm working though in my battery as an exercise in putting order into my own thinking.  As I work through this mental exercise I'm coming up with some thoughts that surprise even me, and I'm happy to discuss them all, so stick with me and we'll try to decide what we're looking for, and to define the practical rifle for all of us.  You may be surprised at the outcome.  I am no expert, just an old shooter going through a mental exercise.

Finally, in today's post, Fred makes the following observation:

You have made the case for a safe full of rifles.
No shooter ever has enough.

Oh, Fred, I hope not.  One of my problems is my case full of rifles.  There is no shortage of firearms available to the fanatics at PawPaw's House, and a big part of this mental exercise is to decide which are practical, and which are not.  We'll continue in this thread over the next several days and see which is which.  Hopefully tomorrow we'll start weeding the turn-row.