Why a 223?
 

It's that time of the year where I start to look at a new gun purchase...school me on the 223.......why? for what? hunting? varmint? zombies?

get a ar 10
308

.223 rem is an awesome cartridge. Accurate. Low recoil. Inexpensive to feed.

Good for deer and varmints and anything that might need shooting in Louisiana.

-It'll kill any animal native to Louisiana
-Effective range is about 200 yards on a deer
-Realatively cheap to shoot
-Ammo is readily available
-Great for shooting zombies
-Also shoots 5.56


This will be my next gun.

-has a little more pop and range than a .223

Add a slide fire bump stock to your AR and really have a good time. I got one for a Christmas and it's fun.

i heard they just came out with a .223 short mag... can anyone confirm?

I've had a .223 super short mag for about 5 years maybe more. It's shooting a little over 3,900 fps. It's a bad a$$ round for sure.

I picked up a bolt action .223 to play with since I already had a bunch of ammo for my AR's. Fun little rifle and you can reach and touch some things with it. Very easy to shoot with hardly any recoil. Add a little more challenge to your deer hunting with it because your shot placement will be much more critical.

Fun for backyard stuff but a waste of ammo as general rule. No tactical advantage to it. It doesn't make for accurate firing of ammo and empties a 30round mag fast with bullets going all over.
Get one chambered for 5.56mm. It will shoot 223 but a 223 is not built to handle the higher pressures of a 5.56mm cartridge. Get a 5.56 and you can shoot both with no worries at all.

Great round. I wouldn't call it a great deer round but, for most plinking apps, it's great. Very fast and, inexpensive to shoot. Ruger makes a "Mini-14" that is in .223 and, it's a pretty rifle. Of course, you can do the whole AR (Plastic black gun, I've heard you call them). A lot of choices with that caliber.

Oh yeah, ammo is everywhere for it. I have thousands of rounds for em with the firearms company.

If you are more interested in accuracy than rate of fire, get a bolt gun. I've seen excellent accuracy from a wide variety of bolt guns in .223 Rem, including the inexpensive Rem 700s and Savages.

Getting varmint level accuracy in semi-autos is an iffy proposition unless you are prepared to put a lot more money in the rifle. An inexpensive .223 bolt gun can take deer reliably to 200 yards, and is useful on varmints and targets out to 500 yards. I once won a long range precision rifle match at ranges to 650 yards with a Rem 700 ADL I paid $300 for in 1999, and other family members have turned in respectable results with the same rifle in 600 yard F-Class.

However, you need to pay more and get a heavier barrel with a faster twist rate and shoot heavier bullets for real reliability past 500 yards. But out to 500 yards, that $300 bolt gun is much more accurate than most shooters who have fired it, including me most of the time. (My daughter proves it.)

Since we've been consistently disappointed with Rem barrels since 2001 or so, we are now uniformly recommending Savage bolt guns for the accuracy minded. We have not been disappointed. Even the inexpensive Axis line is performing very well. For under $400 you are likely to have an excellent shooter. My brother runs a marksmanship training school and he has had excellent accuracy results with Savage rifles also.

I'm thinking adding another Kimber to the safe............

All I shot is zombies !!

Kimber makes a nice gun. I was looking at the mountain ascent.

Gun
 

Good choice I like ultra carry 45.....

why not a .223? an AR15 with a 1:7 twist barrel with 69-80gr bullet makes for a good hog gun. plus with ARs you have a choice of barrels you can get a 1:9, 1:8, 1:7 and if you pair it with the right bullet for optimum performance you would be surprised with the .223 is really capable of doing.

Back when I was the main one shooting in the family, I liked the bigger cartridges: 30-06, .308, etc. Ammo was a lot cheaper back then, I would usually only shoot 20 rounds or so plinking and trying some longer range work at the farm, so the cost and recoil never added up to much.

Now, I've got 3-4 enthusiastic shooters in the household and they're fond of shooting matches, so there are a lot more hungry mouths to feed. An F-Class match is 60 rounds for record plus sighters, for 70 rounds total. This can take it's toll on a young lady's (or younger man's) shoulder shooting heavier bullets. The bigger calibers also cost about twice the price to feed (per round) at any given level of ammo quality.

The wife and children have grown really fond of their .223s Rem and a .222 Rem. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, the NRA will announce the standings in the Woman on Target postal match. Our ladies should be well represented. That's a 10 shot group in the center of that target, shot at 100 yards, with a nickel shown for comparison. My daughter often shoots one of the pea shooters in benchrest matches. She usually doesn't win, but she's started to consistently post 0.5 to 0.6" groups at 100 yards with a factory rifle.

What are your thoughts on the .204 Ruger Cartridge

You can shoot .223 from a marked 5.56, 5.56/.223, but you should NOT shoot 5.56 from anything marked only .223
due to 5.56 operating @ higher pressures.

After the ammo and component availability issues of the past few years, I've grown to prefer the more common cartridges.

As the family has gravitated toward long range shooting, I've also come to prefer ballistic coefficient over muzzle velocity. Muzzle velocity is a rapidly decreasing asset. It's a lot easier to compensate for drop over a known range than wind drift. It's better to reduce wind drift with high BC bullets so less compensation is needed.

The BC of .223 bullets is about as low as I recommend going if wind is a factor. We like the .223, but we also select about the highest BC bullets available in any given rifle. The .204 bullet BCs are kinda low to begin with, and I also suspect that the advertized BCs of the .204 bullets are exaggerated. We've measured BCs from a lot of bullets from .223-.308, so we have a pretty good idea of what a BC will be based on its sectional density and shape. There aren't many bullets (any caliber or shape) whose BC is really twice the sectional density, so we doubt the 40 grain VMAX in .204 (sectional density of 0.137) really has a BC of 0.275. I'd estimate a BC at most 0.250 for that bullet. There are a lot of bullets above 0.400 in .223 and a few above .500.

There are some varmint hunting situations where one needs to take the shot more quickly than one can use a laser rangefinder, and where this factor overrides wind drift at longer ranges. This is where a high speed, low BC bullet will do better than a slower, high BC bullet. In the hunting experience of me and my family, this is a rare event.