Browning Automatic Rifle (7mm Rem Mag)
Kim du Toit
December 13, 2002
12:00 AM CDT
I was taken to task by longtime friend (and Serious Gun Nut) Scobie for not featuring enough artillery (ie. guns chambered for what he refers to as "serious" cartridges) in the GGP series.
Well, phooey. Just to show him, I’ll feature a picture of a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) chambered in the very manly 7mm Rem Magnum:
This one was made in Belgium, when Belgium was known more for its excellent gunmaking rather than as the "capital" of the European Union.
One of the nice things about rifles which shoot the 7mm Mag cartridge is that there’s always an excellent supply in the secondhand rack at the gun store. The reason is that rookie gun buyers are talked into buying a rifle which is "powerful enough to take down any animal, anywhere" (which the 7mm Mag undoubtedly is).
Unfortunately, of course, the 7mm Mag is not the best cartridge to shoot for your first centerfire rifle—the recoil, which is stout even for regular rifle shooters like myself, generally comes as an appalling shock to the unprepared shoulder. This in turn leads to the rookie developing a "flinch" when he pulls the trigger, and as a result he misses pretty much anything he aims at. Of course, the rifle is at fault, so he trades it in on a "better" rifle (only this time in something a little less unpleasant to shoot, like a .308 or even 7mm-08)—hence the plethora of secondhand 7mm Mag rifles to be found everywhere.
All that said, I would imagine that the 7mm Mag recoil for the BAR would be considerably more manageable than in a bolt-action rifle, so if you really want to get into the magnumthumpenblitzenboomer cartridges, this would be as good a way as any.
A decent secondhand BAR so chambered should run you between $850 and $1,100.
And for all you guys who are going to write to me with insults like "wussy" and "girly-man", save yer bandwidth—far too many people own 7mm Mag rifles than have any business shooting them, a fact acknowledged by guides and PHs all over the world.
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