Tag: Guns and such

…well, in the opinion of this bloke at NRAHunting, anyway:

No matter what happens tomorrow, next year or even a decade from now, the .30-06 Springfield will be regarded as one of the best centerfire rifle cartridges of all time. Adopted by the U.S. military in 1906, it was originally loaded with a 150-grain bullet, with a muzzle velocity of 2700 fps. With a 100-yard zero it would drop less than 16 inches at 300 yards and deliver 1,435 ft.-lbs. of energy on target.
These were impressive ballistics for 113 years ago, and in reality, they still are. Jeff Cooper thought it adequate for general-purpose rifle work, and it proved more than capable for Stewart Edward White and Theodore Roosevelt in Africa. Since then, it has admirably served soldiers and hunters all over the world.
Even so, the .30-06 is dying. In fact, it has been dying for almost 100 years.

And Richard Mann then fingers the cartridges which are responsible.

I confess myself to be agnostic on the .30-06 cartridge, having grown up instead with its Euro-equivalent, the 8x57mm Mauser.  And I’ve seen the 8×57 likewise eclipsed, but not by newer cartridges which outperform the Kaiser’s cartridge ballistically.  Instead, as for the .30-06, it was replaced by shooters who preferred other, lighter-recoiling cartridges like the 6.5x55mm Swede as well as the “newcomers” like the .308 Win and so on.

And for the record, it may be a while before I shoot the 6.5 Creedmoor:  not because I dislike new cartridges (although I often do), but because the 6.5 Swede still does it all for me and I see little reason to change.

Which, come to think about it, may well be why many of my Readers (who are often as curmudgeonly and conservative as I) will cling bitterly to their trusted .30-06 Springfield rifles.  And I see nothing at all wrong with that.

Following on from Reader Brad’s escapades with his new Ruger PC-9 carbine, a couple of comments from other Readers piqued my interest.

Specifically, I’m thinking of the Marlin Camp carbine, and still more so, the Camp 45, which was chambered in (duh) .45 ACP and took (most) 1911-type mags.  (I say “most” because mine just wouldn’t load Mec-Gar 1911 mags, even after I had a gunsmith look into it.)

The good news first:  I loved my Camp 45 dearly.  It was more fun than should be allowed without the exchange of body fluids, and the 16″ barrel made the lethargic .45 ACP into, relatively speaking, quite a speedster.  (A 230-grain bullet travelling at 1,200 fps instead of the normal 850… that’s some serious owie at the naughty end.)  And that was the problem.

The Camp 45 was fragile.  Seriously fragile.  First off, any thought of shooting +P ammo should be ignored, because even with ordinary .45 ACP loads, the recoil did horrible things to the internals over time.  The plastic buffer pad (which was about as useful as a sponge) at the back of the recoil spring was constantly cracking and then disintegrating, meaning that you had to have a ready supply of replacements on hand if you were going to shoot more than a couple hundred rounds in a session.  Someone also mentioned that the stock behind the action was prone to cracking;  in my case, a quarter-sized chip of wood came flying off and dinged me in the forehead.  (No blood, no foul;  but it did give me quite a surprise.)

At one of our Feinstein-Daley Memorial Schutzenfests, I believe it was the Layabout Sailor who completely destroyed his Camp 45 by a three-magazine burst of rapid fire — I mean, I think he used the gun as ballast after that, so complete was the destruction.  (No doubt, he’ll remind me of the details in Comments.)

So here’s the thing about the Camp 45:  as I said, it was and is a lot of fun to shoot.  But as a serious self-defense weapon?  It ain’t that.  And forget any kind of combat usage;  I’d be thanking Vulcan every time I pulled the trigger and it went bang  without the gun breaking.  Even if it looked like this (which, I gotta tell ya, looks like fun too):

Feel free to contradict me if your experience has been any different, but I know only four people who ever owned a Camp 45, and none of us own them anymore — which should tell you all you need to know.

Marlin discontinued the Camp carbines in the late 1990s, which means that only secondhand models are now available.  Caveat emptor.

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Afterthought:  I have no experience with Marlin’s Camp 9, by the way, which used Beretta 92-style mags to shoot (duh again) 9mm Europellets.  Feel free to add your comments if you’ve ever owned one, or shot it seriously.