Varmint Riflescopes

Varmint Riflescopes

I have an older Bushnell 4x-12x40mm scope that I like very much except for thing: above about 9x, it will not come to a crisp focus. This is disappointing. I have a Bushnell 3x-9x40mm scope that is a little lighter and shorter, and focuses crisply all the way to the 9x area. I have decided to get back into target shooting for a hobby, and with one of my rifles, I want a scope that doubles as a spotting scope. That means 4-16x, or perhaps 6x-24x, matte finish, with a mildot reticle.

So, what's the choices? Leupold makes beautiful scopes; so do Swarkovski and Nikon--and priced accordingly! I'm not sure that I want to spend $400-$900 on a riflescope! One reader thinks highly of his 3x-12x50mm Barska. I went to Cabela's website, and while the overall rating by customers was okay, it appears that most of them are very good, and some of them are junk. Not at all a surprise, they are Chinese made. (I saw that vaguely Slavic name Barska and hoped that they were from Eastern Europe. Nope.)

Of course, there's no substitute for looking through scopes. I went down to Sportsman's Warehouse in Meridian. I've never noticed how many riflescopes they have, but it had that same mostly empty look that their ammunition shelves now have. (Someone, somewhere, is going to produce the world's first ammunition-fueled black hole, the way people are stockpiling it.) And especially in the higher powered, not outrageously priced range of scopes that I want.

I looked at one of the Bushnell 6x-18x scopes, and I found that it had the same problem as my 4x-12x: the image fuzzed up pretty badly at the top of the range; 12x was as high as it looked good. They didn't carry Tasco, didn't seem to have anything of interest much below $300.

So I drove over the Cabela's. They also had that "Mongolian horde just cleaned us out" look. The salesman there showed the Tasco 6x-24x42mm (or maybe it was 40mm). Very nice, all the way up the power range. But then he told me that while he had one on a .22 Magnum rifle, and liked it very much, he had at least customers who had returned them, because they couldn't take the recoil of a .270 Win. (in one case) or a .300 Win. Mag. (in the other). That's doesn't bode well. He had a lot more confidence in the equivalent Bushnell scopes. I looked through a Bushnell 6x-24x40mm, and all the way up the power range, it was crisp, and even betterthan the Tasco scope. But it didn't have the bullet drop compensator (BDC) that I wanted--and I thought that when I looked online that I had found this Bushnell with the BDC.