Thread: Are we seeing a shift to smaller calibres and lighter bullets?

This talking head video crossed my path on Youtube. Bit waffley but the keys points are basically what gets said here a lot.



It got me thinking, this is a North American justifying a 6mm Creedmoor for large Alaskan game ffs, using one of our favourite bullets of recent times, the 108gr ELD-M. A match bullet. (His load is almost identical to mine which is interesting.) There's more and more of this turning up in my feed recently.

However over the last several years, there's been a good number of videos basically damning any hunter that uses a soft match bullet to everlasting hellfire. And broadly speaking the vast majority of comments support this. And of course there are thousands of videos damning the .224 and .243 cal users to the same fate. The comments can be almost addictive - lots of nasty fights between guys arguing over and over. But here we are on the ass end of the world getting into the weeds of .224 and .243 calibre hunting rifles - its been one of the dominant forum topics for ages.

So the question is - who has actually shifted down in calibre as a result of all the recent fast twist & new projectile developments, and the result of this forum's findings?

Me, my longest calibre/cartridge association is with the .243 Win, but I have started to use .223 Rem and different projectiles directly as a result of being influenced by the .223 thread. But the reality is I have shot more deer with the .308 over the last several years than all the others put together (including the Creedmoors). And that isn't going to change probably ever. (But I think that's got a lot to do with the DPT Hunter chassis and the simple scope setup - I could drop one of probably 10-12 Tikka barrelled actions in common chamberings into that chassis and get the same result.)