Good Decisions

There was a time when hunting was not all about the latest high tech camo clothing, ballistic reticles and trail cameras. The smell of woodsmoke, wet wool and gun grease would fill your nostrils and a plaid shirt and OD green field pants seems to hide you from whitetails just fine. It wasn’t all that long ago that the rifle you carried had scars given to it by your grandfather and the walnut and steel seemed to be a part of the chilly, pre-dawn woods you longed to roam. Back then the bullet hunters trusted was the Remington Core-Lokt and this year marks its 75th anniversary.

Bullet wise, a lot has changed over the last 75 years. John Nosler has given us the Partition, Barnes an all-copper X bullet and today it seems like plastic tips on bullets are as prevalent as tattoos. None of this changes the fact that the Core-Lokt has probably killed more deer than any other bullet or that it works as well today as it did three-quarters of a century ago. Choosing a Core-Loke in 1939 was a good decision and it still is today.

The Remington Core-Lokt is a cup and core bullet featuring a drawn, gilding metal jacket and a lead core. This is the way bullets have been made for a long time because for one, its effective and two, its affordable. (A box of Core-Lokts will not make your fingernails dig into your credit card as you hand it to the gun store clerk.) Cup and core bullets will not stay together like bonded bullets but core separation with a Core-Lokt is not that common, particularly when it impacts at velocities below 3000 fps. In fact, as common occurrence as some would like you to believe this is, I’ve never seen a Core-Lokt separate on a game animal.

They do expand wide and this can reduce penetration when compared to other, more modern bullet styles. But, best I can remember, like I’ve never seen a Core-Lokt shed its jacket, I’ve never seen one fail to penetrate deep enough. Does it happen? I’m sure it has, trusted sources tell me so but its called a Core-Lokt for a reason. About 20 years ago I climbed the mountain in front of our hillbilly hunting camp and just after daylight shot the nicest deer to ever come off our property. A 180 grain round nose Core-Lokt from a .308 Winchester stopped him. Since then Core-Lokts from various cartridges from .243 to .35 have put meat in my freezer and heads on my wall.

Are there better big game bullets out there? Better is a subjective term but you cannot argue that there are bullets that offer different sorts of terminal performance. A Core-Lokt has never let me down and while I might not be hunting with Dad’s old Winchester, Grandpa’s old Marlin or that antique 99, stuffing a rifle with Core-Lokts takes me back to that simpler time when a good shooting rifle, a sharp knife and warm boots were all a real hunter needed.

When I decided to quite my job as a special agent for the railroad police and write about guns and hunting full time, I wondered if that was a good decision. I could write a pretty snazzy police report but when you publish an article in American Rifleman there’ll be a lot more eyes looking at it. I made the decision then that while I’d write about any gun or hunt that interested me, I would specialize in ammunition. This was partly due to the fact that no other writers seemed to be experts on ammo, partly because you cannot shoot guns without ammo but mostly because I’d been enamored with cartridges and bullets for most of my life.

Since then I’ve spent a lot of time testing a lot of bullets in all sorts of test mediums and I’ve also spent a lot of time conducting autopsies on dead critters while other writers were back by the fire, whiskey in hand. I’ve learned a lot about bullets and how they work and I’ve also learned that it was a good decision to make my career change. Based on those experiences, my advice would be that if there is something you really want to do with your life then do it. I’d also offer that if you can’t kill your deer with a Core-Lokt, you’ve got problems another bullet won’t fix.