Bless Their Hearts

Six truths for the neophobic and hidebound naysayers

Weatherby’s new 25 RPM cartridge.

Since the introduction of the 6.5 Creedmoor, we’ve seen a rash of new rifle cartridge introductions with similar characteristics, which include heavy for caliber bullets, high ballistics coefficients, sharp shoulders and fast twist barrels. This is great for shooters and hunters because it gives them more better performing options. But with every new cartridge comes a batch of critics wondering why manufacturers never make the stuff they want, claiming none of the new cartridges make any sense, and that they only exist to sell more guns and ammunition. Well, to an extent they’re right—the goal of gun and ammunition manufacturers is to sell more guns and ammunition.

However, if those new cartridges were not introduced, what would the gun and ammunition companies be selling? Um, the same damned guns and ammunition they’ve been selling. What a lot of these naysayers fail to consider is the massive amounts of money necessary to create and introduce a new gun or a new cartridge for retail sale. In most cases it takes many months if not years, and a shit-ton of money. So, why bother? To make up for that investment they must sell three shit-tons of guns and/or ammo than they were selling.

Maybe the goal is to produce a cartridge or gun that has a ballistic or performance advantage over what we currently have. You think that might be a good idea? It was in 1906 when the 30-06 Springfield was introduced, and maybe an even better idea when Winchester necked that case down to shoot a 7mm bullet and called it the 270 Winchester. (For those mathematically challenged, seven millimeters equals 0.275 inches, and a 270 bullet is 0.277-inches.) You see, that’s how things work and it’s how we very slowly and incrementally went from a 30-30 Winchester to a 300 Winchester Magnum 70 years later, and from the SPAD 13 in 1917 to an F16 in 1978.

Weatherby’s 107-grain Hammer bullet factory load for their 25 RPM has a BC of 0.510 and an advertised muzzle velocity of 3350 fps. Out of a 22-inch barrel it produced 3285 fps.

On social media, Weatherby has been taking a rash of crap over the introduction of the 25 RPM cartridge. (I never realized there were so many expert ballisticians unemployed and living on the Internet.) Oddly enough, all this negativeness is coming from folks who have never shot a rifle chambered for the 25 RPM. One expert with 30,000 followers did an initial post damning the cartridge, and then in a second post, he admitted he hadn’t even realized the 25 RPM was a long action cartridge. (I’m not going to identify him—bless his heart—and subject him to further embarrassment.) He then implies the 25 RPM is really no better than the 25 Creedmoor. Well, if he had tested both side by side—factory ammo versus factory ammo and handloads verses handloads—he would have known that, on average, the 25 RPM will shoot the same bullet about 200 fps faster, and 200 fps is what makes the 6.5 PRC ballistically superior to the 6.5 Creedmoor.

Click the image above to read my full review of the Weatherby 25 RPM that includes factory ammo and handload testing as well as hunting results.

All the expert’s followers quickly agreed, many with the standard comment of, “It’s an answer to a question no one was asking.” If that’s your position, then your opinion is most likely one that no one was seeking. When you say something like that it might sound cool, sound like you might have some way of divining the thoughts of all the shooters in the world, but in truth all this statement really does is illustrate you either have neophobia or a very narrow understanding of ballistics and the history of metallic cartridges.

Is Weatherby’s new 6.5 RPM the greatest thing ever? Well, no, of course not. But what if you really like the 25-06 Remington but want to shoot high BC bullets? Short of re-barreling your 25-06 with a fast twist barrel and then ONLY shooting handloads, the 25 RPM is a better option. Similarly, if you really like the idea of the 25 Creedmoor but want more velocity, the 25 RPM is also a better option. And too, you might be a 257 Weatherby Magnum lover—there are a lot of them—but also want to shoot higher BC bullets than a 1 in 10 twisted barrel can stabilize, but at the same time you don’t want to give up all the velocity going to the 25 Creedmoor would require. In that case the 25 RPM should make you very happy.

I like the 25 Creedmoor (left) more than the Weatherby 25 RPM (right), but I’m not going to be so arrogantly insolent that I’ll not acknowledge the 25 RPM is a ballistically superior cartridge and refuse to use it.

And another thing, a lot of new cartridge naysayers talk about handloading and the advantages it offers current cartridges like it is as common as bad breath and bad opinions. (Many criticized the 7mm Backcountry for this, when in fact you can reload it.) But reloaders are not that common. You are more likely to meet a woman with fake boobs than you are someone who reloads their own ammunition. When a manufacturer introduces a new cartridge, they hope shooters will handload for it, but they make it for those who will shoot factory ammunition. (This is why so much factory ammunition exists.) They do this because—get this—most shooters shoot factory ammo.

You should also realize that I’m just not climbing on the bandwagon of the newest thing. If you will remember, I wildcatted the 25 Creedmoor more than a decade ago because I believed it would be better than the other 0.25-caliber cartridges currently offered. You could say it’s “my” cartridge, though I know others were doing the same thing. So, you would think that I would be a naysayer of the 25 RPM because—how could it possibly be better than my idea. But there are these things called facts.

As a point of ballistic fact, the 25 RPM is superior to the 25 Creedmoor. However, for 90% the hunting and shooting I do, the 25 Creedmoor suits me just fine. I’d not trade it for a 25 RPM, but ballistically the 25 RPM is better, and my affection for the 25 Creed is not going to prevent me from acknowledging or using the 25 RPM. And this takes us to the most important thing about rifle cartridges. If you have read my latest book, Rifle Cartridges for the Hunter, you probably know where this is all headed.

The attachments shooters and hunters have with rifle cartridges, along with the reasons they like and dislike them, have just as much to do with emotions as they do with ballistics.

1: The truth is that more than anything else, the rifle cartridge we choose is our best way of expressing our ballistic individuality. There is no best cartridge for anything, but there are cartridges each of us like better than others. It’s also why some of us carry Benchmade knives, some of us carry CRKT knives, and why some of us—God forbid—still carry a Barlow.

2: Another truth is that every new cartridge has specifically addressed a question or problem shooters were asking. In the case of Weatherby’s 25 RPM, it answers the same question the 250 Savage answered in 1915, that the 257 Roberts answered a few years later, and that the 25-06 answered in 1969. The 25 RPM is in many ways just a slightly better answer than all those were.

3: The third truth is that you do not have to buy a 25 RPM. You don’t have to like or buy the 25 Creedmoor, any of the other Creedmoors, the PRCs or the ARCs. But you not liking or not buying them does not diminish their appeal to others or the ballistic advantages they offer. Some folks are so hidebound they really struggle with the introduction of any new cartridge that might be a bit better than the one they have invested in and have been swearing by.

4: The fourth truth is that when it comes to what most of us use rifle cartridges for, these small ballistic differences on paper we all want to argue about can rarely ever be seen in real application. I’ve hunted all over the world for all sorts of big game animals and there is no doubt I could have done it all with a 308 Winchester. In fact, I could have done a hell of a lot of it—most of it—with a 30-30 Winchester. But I wanted to use something else and a lot of the killing and shooting I’ve done with various cartridges—there have been a lot of them—I did to make me happy. As a subset of the third and fourth truth, some folks cannot be happy if they feel there might be a cartridge that’s better than their cartridge, so they talk shit about the new cartridge, and that’s what makes them happy fools.

Kill a lot of deer or your best deer with a 7mm-08, and you’ll likely think it is the best deer cartridge of all time. The truth is there are a lot of other cartridges with different “paper” ballistics that will work just as well.

5: The fifth truth is a very novel one: It’s not wise to be offering opinions on things you have no experience with. Based on the comments from the expert I mentioned and his hidebound followers, I think it’s safe to say that none of them have ever killed an animal with a 25 RPM, shot a rifle chambered for a 25 RPM, handloaded a 25 RPM cartridge, or even held one in their Cheeto stained fingers. Of course, in today’s world on social media, things as trivial as experience or facts never get in the way of clicks and likes.

6: The sixth and final truth is that for now, and a for a hell of a long time down the road, regardless of what new cartridges might be introduced, when it comes time to survive the apocalypse, or fight the Russians or the Chinese, or some other form of communist aggression, we will all be using 9mm pistols, 5.56 and 7.62 rifles, and 12 gauge shotguns. (If you don’t have one of each, I’d suggest you rectify that.) All this other shit—all these other new cartridges—are just for fun. They’re for having fun on the range and in the field, and fortunately for us there is a lot of fun to be had—and things to be learned—by shooting, hunting, and experimenting with different cartridges.

Have your fun the way you want to have it, regardless of what some unemployed ballistician or social media expert says, because—bless their little hearts—they are not going to be the one shooting your damned rifle anyway.

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A Final Thought: I think what bothers me the most about the negativism around the Weatherby 25 RPM, as well as with some of other recent new cartridges, is that being negative is the best way to get attention. If you are positive about a new cartridge, the assumption is that you were paid to be that way. I’ve been at this gun writing thing for a quarter century and the best way I have found to deal with things I have negative opinions about is to just not write about them at all. I ignore them just like I do the humans I don’t like. However, I do make an exception for the 30-06.

Nobody’s perfect.

If you would like to read about real field experiences with 50 of the different rifle cartridges I have used to take game animals all over the world, check out my latest book, Rifle Cartridges for the Hunter. You can order a copy direct from Amazon.