Most Accurate Rifle Ammo

Above, one of my personal ammo boxes. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Firearms are constantly being tested by different entities for how well they shoot, workmanship, construction and other factors. Like anything else, some guns are better than others.

So is ammunition. I hadn't given it much thought, personally. But like firearms, some ammo is apparently better than others.

Outdoor Life has posted an article on the "Most Accurate Rifle Ammo".

They begin with:

At Outdoor Life, we’re always seeking to improve how we test and write about gear. The methodology used with our gun tests is something we’ve developed over decades and is, without question, the most comprehensive and rigorous you’ll find. Our signature evaluations include annual shakedowns of the best rifles, best handguns, and best shotguns.

While we’ve written about ammunition plenty in the past, I’ve never been fully satisfied with how we — or anybody else in the outdoor industry — has gone about testing it. Traditionally, an ammunition company would send out a few boxes of a new offering and the writer would blaze through the rounds. Typically a glowing report would follow shortly after, with some numbers from three- or five-shot groups to back it up.

Evaluating ammunition based on such a small sample size has never been our approach. And though we take pains to shoot ammunition in meaningful quantities — we request a minimum of one case of ammo (200 rounds) and more typically two or three cases for a given load — harvesting the data from all that trigger pulling has been difficult.

Our goal is always to gather good accuracy data through multiple rifles (whenever possible) but that’s only part of the equation. We want to collect velocity data as well, capturing the average muzzle velocity, extreme spread (ES), and the standard deviation (SD). Lastly, when applicable, we want to shoot it at distance to see how it behaves at longer ranges. All this is critical to understanding whether a load is consistent or not.

To read more, go here.