Before we dive into the meat of this year’s Ballistic’s Best hunting rifles report, let’s take a close look at the evaluation process. To shoot and evaluate 13 new bolt-action hunting rifles, three experienced riflemen met at my home range in Middle Tennessee.
Each of these rifles were given a score of 1 to 5 points each for aesthetics, ergonomics, sight mounting ease, trigger, recoil control, reloading ease, accuracy, reliability and value to price. The cost of these rifles ranged from an MSRP of $616 to almost $3,500. To present a more “apples-to-apples” test, we divided the 13 rifles into two categories—one below $1,600 (Economy), the other for those above that price (High-End).
Hornady supplied the majority of the ammo for the test again this year, with more than 1,200…