[broom_jm]

If you zero a standard 170gr flat-nosed 30/30 bullet for 250 yards, (highly impractical to begin with) the bullet will reach a midpoint that is 7.5" high at 150 yards. From 250 yards to 500 yards, the bullet will fall 98", or 8'2", from line of sight. From 700 to 800 yards the amount of additional drop is 157 inches...call it an even 13 feet. The total drop from line of sight at 800 yards will be ~461 inches, or nearly 38.5 feet. These are sizable numbers, but they are still just numbers. The 338 Lapua has drop "numbers" too...they just happen to be a lot smaller. They must still be taken into account for long-range shooting.

With that being said, the 30/30 is a fine 800 yard deer gun, so long as the deer is made from plate steel and the shots are being made for fun, not on live game. At known distances, from bench positions, using much more powerful cartridges and with highly specialized sniper rifles, 800 yard shots are already somewhat challenging. With the 30/30, the challenges are magnified but largely the same. Distance, holdover and windage must be allowed for in order to place shots on the target.

If someone practiced regularly with a single-shot 30/30, shooting a pointed bullet designed for lower impact speeds, and went to the effort required to get the exact distance and windage for a deer at +/- 500 yards, there is nothing that says a shot could not be made. For a lever-action, using flat-nosed bullets, where the exact yardage is not known, common sense should prevail and much shorter shots be taken.

As Saskshooter pointed out...our responsibility as hunters is to take shots with a very high probability for success. If the odds are much higher that you'll wound your target than kill it with relatively expedience, it's time to do a little more actual hunting, first. As long as these threads are about "shooting" at long range, I think they're interesting. When someone tries to claim a 44 pistol or a lever-action 30/30 rifle is just fine for hunting at 500 yards or more, well I just have to

There...now BD will be satisfied.

 

[broom_jm]

No one can ever be certain that any shot they make will be a "clean kill", so using your logic, then no one should ever take any shot to kill an animal due to the uncertainty of what happens after you pull the trigger. I too ask the question what is a "clean kill" and one person's definition of it can vastly differe from another's.

See, now that's just using semantics to try and cloud the issue. This is a matter of percentages, BD. Nobody is arguing that even short-range shots can't go wrong, but you have to put the odds in your favor.

A long time ago, many people sighted in their guns to hit a paper plate 4 out of 5 times at 100 yards, or whatever the goal was for that group of people and that part of the country. In other words, there was a margin for error and you tried to make sure that most of the time you could make a killing shot. Nowadays, I think the bar has been raised, considerably. I would argue that it's for the best; wouldn't you?

Trying to make out the term "clean kill" as some sort of nebulous quantity is another cop out, and I'm willing to bet you know better, you're just trying to muddy the waters. Did the animal drop immediately and/or die within a very short time of being hit? You don't need a complicated set of criteria to determine if a kill was clean and quick. To put it succinctly: A clean kill is one where you know you did everything in your power to dispatch the animal as efficiently as possible...and you succeeded. Simple as that.

Lobbing a chunk of lead into an animal's gastric cavity from 500 yards away will not have you feeling like you succeeded. Not if you're an ethical hunter.