HARDCORE

y Jon Sundra
PRAIRIE DOG
PERFECTION
A couple of hot sessions over a dog
town convert this hardcore bolt-action
shooter into an AR enthusiast.
T
his past July. I was invited to
attend a combined semi-
^Btar/pralrie r.it shoot in
Wyoming, sponsored by Kushmaster
Firearms International. Over the »0
years I've been writing about guns for a
living, my first love has always been
the bolt-action rifle, though I will admit
to having had intermittent flings w ith
the falling-block single-shot. But what I
learned front that first seminar and
field trip changed niv mind about the
AR-platform rifle.
W hat I discovered—in addition to
really getting to know the k u» itself—Ls
that there are definite advantages to a
seml-auto 011 the prairie dog towns.
With a IhjIi action, whether a repeater
or a single-shot, it takes a few seconds
to reload after a miss, and there are
plenty of those when you're shooting
at tiny targets 300 and i00 yards away
under the typically ever-present wind
conditions. Working the boll moves the
gun enough that you can have difficulty
re-acquiring your target, especially
when you've got a high-magnification
scope with a limited field of view.
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