I like to think of myself as a rifleman, or perhaps better stated, a rifleman in the making. And what exactly is that? Well, it’s certainly not a once a year hunter who has to take his rifle into the store with him so the clerk can tell him exactly what cartridges are right for it. And it most certainly isn’t someone who thinks their hunting rifle is perfectly sighted in because when they bought the scope, someone at the store bore-sighted it for them.

In fact a rifleman doesn’t even have to be a hunter, although many are and a rifleman doesn’t have to be a match competitor, although many are. Here in Montana, I’ve often heard someone claim they can’t hit paper targets very well but “put hair on something and I can knock it down at most any range.” Experienced riflemen consider such statements as blathering. Converse to that, I’ve never known a good match competitor who was a dismal failure in the hunting fields. The difference is in the quantity of rounds fired. No one ever became a rifleman by shooting a few dozen cartridges a year.

To me a rifleman is someone with an abiding interest in actually shooting rifles, and has some ability to direct a rifle’s projectile onto a target — any target. A rifleman’s rifle will be sighted in when he needs it, and he will have determined a good load for it. That’s not the same as saying he has found the “best load.” I don’t think there is such a thing. All that’s necessary is a good load, defined as one capable of consistent enough precision in a chosen rifle to always be accurate enough to hit a given target. For a varmint rifle that might be a ground squirrel at 200 yards or, for an elk rifle, it might be the vital organ area at 300 yards. For target shooters, a good load is perhaps one that stays in the 20" 10-ring of a 1,000-yard bull’s-eye, or the 12" of steel from belly-line to backbone of a metallic ram silhouette.