Understand your Terms

I see this usage pretty often;

   “Maintains less than 1 1/2 minute of angle accuracy at 100 yards/meters – Guaranteed !”

What I want to know is; how does the rifle know the distances to your targets when there are no electronics involved?


If the inherent angular dispersion is 1.5 MOA at 100 yards, the underlying assumption would be that the inherent angular dispersion will somehow be different at some other distance, else they wouldn’t specify a distance.  Sure; the wind comes more into play farther out, but that’s a separate issue, no?  Or am I missing something?  Maybe for the sake of clarity they should say “…as tested at 100 yards.”  I at least would have more respect for them then, but maybe I don’t know squat.

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6 thoughts on “Understand your Terms

  1. Joe has talked about the bullets he has where the groups are larger at 400 yards than 600 yards – seems counterintuitive, but he has the data to back it up.

    I imagine you could have a bullet design that is only stable to, say, 200 yards. I don’t know of one, but I guess since the inverse is true, it may be true.

  2. It would be more accurate to say that the guarantee is a 1.5 inch three shot group or smaller at 100 yards. However the guarantee is technically correct as written.

  3. My limited experience suggests that a .22lr rifle that shoots into an inch at 50 yards will shoot at significantly more than the expected two inches at 100 yards. So I guess it’s not crazy to mention the distance.

    Probably, though they’re just being sloppy.

  4. I should have mentioned that the item described is a removable scope mount, not a rifle. They may have been attempting to say something like; repeatable zero to within 1.5 MOA, and in that case the distance would be irrelevant because we’d be talking about an angular deviation only. Maybe they’re not sure what they meant to say. Point is; this sort of thing is common.

    Matt and Ry; I see your respective points. In either case it would add clarity to say; “as measured at x yards”.

  5. I read a book about guns recently. The authors knew what they were talking about, but the editing, sentence structure, and the tables, were so poorly edited and sometimes random that someone who didn’t already know quite a bit about the subject would be right to question the whole package– the history, the mechanical descriptions, and the data. I know the authors from reading their forum posts and they’re very knowledgeable and experienced. At shooting and gun collecting. Not at writing, or getting a book published.

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