One Rifle To Rule Them All

Let’s take the once-mythical one mile shot and make it relevant again by dumping you into the prone position, starting the stop watch and having eighty of your closest competitors in the 2014 Precision Rifle Series split up five rounds each over the smoking barrel of a Desert Tech SRS A1 chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum.

And let’s make it an official match stage at next Saturday’s Heat Stroke Open in Elk City, Oklahoma on July 12 and 13 and label it Extended Long Range. Extreme if you like. Elite if you must.

Okay, I lied. It’s really 1,720 yards and not 1,760 because of those power lines out yonder but what’s 36.576 meters amongst friends? I mean, you still can’t see the target well enough with the naked eye to make any sense of it. You still need a rifle capable of sub-MOA performance. And you still need a cartridge with a fast enough muzzle velocity, high enough ballistic co-efficiency and large enough caliber to actually finish the job when it gets there.

Remember, we’re still talking about 80 finicky sharpshooters, each with their own set of opinions, egos and idiosyncracies all gathering at one spot to share one rifle, one brand of ammo and only one of them able to claim the match and its accompanying first-place points towards September’s invite-only Precision Rifle Series Championship Match.

So, if it’s really only going to be just one rifle for this entire stage of the match then you better get the one weapons system with just as big an ego in bullpup configuration to boot and enough personality to pass around 400 trigger presses. Of course, we’re talking about the bolt-action prodigy. The Desert Tech Stealth Recon Scout, in A1 accompaniment, and you better be loading it with authentic Desert Tech Premium Match munitions to make it copacetic all around.

Oh, and one more thing. Let’s film it for posterity. Let’s train a camera on each shooter and hang a go pro downrange so we can splash this target all over Youtube. Of course, it’s only one stage of many in the match. And the Heat Stroke is only one match of many that make up the Series.

But it’s still one mile, under duress, with one Desert Tech SRS A1 for all. It’s still more than 14 NFL football fields lined up end to end. It’s still the distance you had to run to graduate from middle school P.E. It’s still the difference between a casual plinker and actual aficianado of the sport whether you’re former military, current LEO, forever hunter or official competitor.

Tell the occasional bystander that you just drilled a target one mile away and they’ll insist you drive them to the target to prove it. Come next Saturday, eighty of the best shooters in the nation will get their chance, five shots apiece, each hit worth 2 points for a stage total of 10. All with the same rifle.

Magazine in. Bolt back. On my command . . .

Note: Desert Tech will be represented at the Heat Stroke by team shooters Adam Roberts, B.J. Bailey and Steve Elmenhorst and will be awarding the winner of the Almost A Mile stage a $500 gift certificate towards the purchase of a Desert Tech rifle chassis (SRS, Covert or HTI).