Why I still hunt with a .30-30

I own a 6.5 Creedmoor. I like it. It shoots better than I do, which is the correct order of operations for rifles.

But when the season opens and I walk into the woods where I grew up, the rifle in my hands is a **Marlin 336** in **.30-30 Winchester**. Drilled and tapped, peep-sighted, and older than I am. My father's before it was mine.

This isn't nostalgia. This is a choice I've re-made every year for twenty years, and I'd like to explain it without getting sentimental about it.

## The math is fine

A 150-grain .30-30 at 2,390 fps is not a glamorous ballistic profile. It is also enough bullet and velocity to cleanly kill any deer inside 200 yards, which is approximately every shot I have ever taken.

The woods I hunt are mixed oak and pine at modest elevation. The longest shot I have taken in two decades was 143 yards. The average is closer to 60. At those distances the .30-30 lacks nothing, and the Creedmoor's flatter trajectory is a solution to a problem I don't have.

## The rifle is fast

A lever gun fires, re-cocks, and presents the next round with one hand motion. No bolt to cycle with the dominant hand. No safety to disengage. If I miss — which I try not to do, but there it is — I am on target for a follow-up in under a second.

Mounted, the rifle weighs 7 pounds with a sling and a full tube. It carries all day. It handles in the brush. It is a pleasure to shoulder and a pleasure to shoot, which are not small things when you might be carrying it for ten hours and firing it for half a second.

## The habit is a training aid

I know where my .30-30 hits. I know what the trigger does. I know the rifle's quirks and the tube's quirks and the bolt's quirks. I don't know a new rifle that well, even a better one, and the cost of *not* knowing your rifle in the field is higher than the cost of using a cartridge that's one generation older than you'd pick today.

Bolt guns win in the magazine. Autoloaders win in the cyclic rate. Lever guns win in what shooters sometimes forget to value: muscle memory, handiness, and the absolute absence of drama.

## The honest caveats

If I hunted West Texas mulies at 400 yards, I'd carry a Creedmoor. If I hunted elk at altitude, I'd want more cartridge. If I were going to shoot a thousand rounds a year in practice, I'd own a bolt gun and shoot that.

None of those things describe my hunting. The .30-30 describes my hunting. I think there's a lot of American rifle buying that would be clearer if more shooters asked themselves what their hunting actually looked like — in yards, in shots, in hours of carrying — before they asked what their rifle should be.

For me the answer was the one that came with the rifle my father handed me. That turned out to be the right answer.