 A lot of us hear about an exciting new sport or past time and we decide we want to get into it and I'll tell you the number of options out there make it so tough. We're going to talk about what kind of rifle you should get if you want to do long range shooting and there is no perfect answer. And just so you know, if you're not familiar with affiliate marketing, what happens is when you go online and you search for best long range rifle, you're going to see a bunch of articles pop up that say the three best long range rifles reviewed or the 10 best rifles of the year, et cetera, et cetera. Well, 99% of these articles are affiliate articles. Very few are just somebody out of the the non personal benefit seeking goodness of their heart just wants to put information out there. Affiliate marketing isn't a bad thing at all. I love it. I do it. Basically, if you decide to buy something and you buy it after clicking on the link that I give you, then you don't pay any extra. And the company says, hey, thanks for sending it my way. And then they give me a tiny percentage of that sale. So nobody loses. Everybody wins. It's it's not a bad thing, but it's something that people who don't really know what they're talking about will start a business in affiliate marketing and then they will hire somebody who's never seen or touched a rifle to write an article in horrible English and then the business person who has this website will fix the article up a little bit and put it out there with their affiliate links. And they don't really care if you get the good information. So be aware of those websites. It's my first big morning. Next thing that I'm going to suggest is that you think about what your primary purpose and your secondary probable purpose will be for the rifle. When you think about long range, how long are you thinking? If you live in the southeast or anywhere in the east, east of the Mississippi, chances are you're unless you're really lucky, you don't live close to a place where you can shoot extreme long ranges. If you live in Utah, in southern Utah, jeesh, good move making that decision. What a great place to shoot. There's so much land around that you can go and go really long. So in that circumstance, you mean a thousand or two thousand or three thousand yards when you think of long range. For most people, that kind of range just isn't possible. You might have a range that goes out to a hundred yards or 300 yards that is within an hour or two of your home. But to get someplace where you can go 600 yards is a half day drive or a full day drive to get there. So what are you really going to be using this rifle for? And if your answer is, I want to shoot nice, tight groups only for sport. I'm never going to hunt. I'm not going to use it for defense. I'm not going to use it for real long range stuff. I just want to shoot the best possible groups at 200 yards. Well, then your choice of a rifle might be very different than if you are in southern Utah and you decide that you want to see how tight of a group you can shoot at 2,500 yards. You're going to make a different choice on the rifle. So then what's your secondary purpose? And the reason I think this is important is you can double up purposes to a certain degree. Here's where here's where this is a tough call, though. If your primary purpose is target shooting and you're going to drive your vehicle up, take your rifle that's in a case and walk it 20 yards to where the word is you're going to shoot from, then having a really heavy gun is a good idea. Doesn't recoil as much. It feels better. It's just I like heavy guns. If your secondary purpose, though, is that you want to take it hunting once a year and go hiking up and down the Colorado 13,000 feet high mountains, and then you don't want the heavy rifle. So you're going to have to give up some of that comfort to have a really lightweight rifle. If, on the other hand, your plan is to do long range hunting and you think of long range as 200 yards and nothing beyond, then and you're not going to shoot for fun at all. Just you're going to go out hunting and you're going to make each trip be a 20 mile hike. Then a really lightweight gun would make much more sense. So those are some of the first considerations. I'm a target shooter. I'm not a hunter. So that's the advice I'm going to give is based more on target shooting. I think that probably the hottest cartridge right now or the best choice for you would be the 6.5 Creedmoor. And everybody's loved this for the last five or ten years to really become popular. It is more efficient the way that the bullet flies through the air and the way that wind isn't able to blow it as much as some of the other bullet sizes and weights. And I'm simplifying this, but the 6.5 Creedmoor you're not going to go wrong going for that. If your primary purpose is target shooting between 100 yards and 1,500 yards or a mile, something like that. Anywhere in that area, 6.5 Creedmoor is great. Now, if you never plan to shoot beyond a thousand yards or 500 yards, then a 308 is also a great choice. If you're never going to shoot beyond 500 yards, heck, a .223 caliber can be a good choice. In the old days, at least it was less expensive and hardly any recoil. I love it. We shoot ours out to 600 yards at our main range. We do no mad rifleman experiences. We shoot it out to make our furthest target. Seven hundred and seven yards that we use it for. But I have friends who shoot a .223 out to over a thousand yards. It's possible. Just need a heavier, hand-loaded cartridge. Heavier bullet and hand-load, but that's possible. So it really depends on what your unique situation is. If you are a big, buffed, fat six foot six dude that doesn't mind recoil and might someday want to shoot extreme long range, then I wouldn't go for a .308 or a .223. I'd go for a .6.5 Creedmoor or a 7 millimeter Remington Magnum or 300 Winchester Magnum any of those would be a good choice. But I guess what I'm boiling this whole short little podcast down to is if you don't have a quote unquote long range rifle yet, then a 6.5 Creedmoor, you're not going to be sorry. You got it. And so then which one should you buy? I it's there's so many good ones out there. I'm just going to stammer. I would say that I am tempted to say that if you spend at least a thousand bucks, you'll get a pretty good one. If you spend twenty five hundred, you'll get a way better one. If you spend four hundred, you'll get a just fine one, depending on what your your goals are. I think it's is it. I think the Ruger American and Weatherby also puts out one that we have. But either of those for less than five hundred bucks, I think you're going to get a rifle that will shoot a group and a group is five shots at a hundred yards. You'll be able to shoot a five shot group and all the bullets will land within an inch. Most likely any any factory gun that's even a five hundred dollar gun is going to be able to do that. And that's just incredible. That's that's wonderful group. And as you go out further and further, then then you would want to have a much tighter group than that. But for for most of us that don't have access to extreme long ranges, just about any rifle in a six, five grade more or three or eight, you're going to do just fine on. Now, you do want it to be a bolt action. That's important. I almost skipped over that. There are some semi-automatics or lever actions that, you know, your friend will tell you, oh, yeah, it shoots. It drives tax. It puts everything through one hole. Yeah, it might. There are a few. But to play it safe, you're probably going to have more precision. You're going to have better luck, more consistency if you go with a bolt action. That's what most long range folks go for. Now, if you're doing if your primary purpose is to do a PRS kind of match where you're running and gunning and do a bunch of those guys use semi-automatics as far as I know. And I don't know what PRS rules are, but I'm talking about that kind of match, the tactical match where you get set up in one position and you shoot and then you run to another position and shoot from there. A lot of people are using semi-automatics, but they're also not going for extreme long ranges. They're going out to maybe five hundred yards or a thousand yards or a little bit more, but they're not shooting at a mile or more in most of those matches. However, I think they're probably a good number of people that are still using bolt actions and even in those matches because they prefer the precision, at least the matches that I attend. And I don't do PRS precision rifle series. I'm sure it's a wonderful group of folks, just not a match I've ever done. I've done similar, but I don't know what their rules are. Anyway, you doing competition, you hunting, you just shooting long range for kicks and giggles like I do to make steel targets ring. All of that depends on what kind of gun you want. If you have questions, shoot me an email. I love talking about this stuff. I hopefully have helped you narrow it down some. Don't get a crazy wildcat cartridge we've never heard of unless you're really experienced shooter. Thanks for listening. This is Shepherd.