From: bartb@hpfcla.fc.hp.com (Bart Bobbit)
Newsgroups: rec.guns
Subject: Re: Distance & accuracy (30.06 or 308)
Date: 25 Aug 1994 11:03:19 -0400

Thomas Woolman (woolmata@dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu) wrote:
  
: It's been my opinion that the venerable '06 has been getting unfairly
: knocked around recnetly by the .308 proponents. 

Unfairly knocked around?  What is unfair about it?  If thousands of
shooters find out the .308 produces better scores in competition than
the '06 ever did, seems to me that's very fair.  

I haven't heard of this unfair business about the .308 since the late
1960s.  During the early 1960s, when the .308 was fully entrenched as
`the' highpower competition cartridge of choice, the top several scores
at many matches were the same.  Tie breaking began to be a tedious job
and most folks were fed up with it.  The old military A, B and C targets
had rather big scoring rings based on attainable accuracy dating back
to around 1900.  For the .30-06 cartridge, they were suitable because
the accuracy levels the '06 could deliver resulted in a reasonable
spread of scores from the top down.  As the .308 easily shot about twice
as accurate (about half the group size) as the .30-06, it was not
easy to discriminate shooting ability amongst the top shooters.  So, the
NRA changed the highpower target's respective scoring rings in '66 to about
half their original size.  Finally, the ability to discriminate shooting
skills was much easier and much more fair to everybody.

But a few folks didn't like that.  Those who chose to keep shooting the
.30-06 found out that instead of shooting perfect scores or only dropping
a point or two like they did on the old target, they never shot perfect
scores any more and dropped one or two handfulls of points in each match.
A lot of these folks cried `unfair' about this.  Some of them even tried
to disallow anybody shooting a .308 in their local club matches.  Some
even protested to the NRA about this so-called `unfair' bunch of rules
that allowed the .308 and targets with smaller scoring rings to be used.

An old timer in his 90s told me many years ago that the folks who liked
to use the various size black powder target rifles at the turn of the
century cried `unfair' when others began shooting the .30-06 and getting
better scores than they did.  

BB