Drawing First Blood

Shooters sift rifle scopes by price, power, dials, reticles, lens diameter — but what about length?

Scarface

“It stung. The blood was warm, trickling down my nose. I won’t do that again!” This account of recoil’s kiss seems almost spurious. How can anyone planning to fire a rifle more than once guarantee an unblemished brow? Mine is mostly scar tissue!

Such a disconnect makes sense when you consider the standard length of a rifle-stock now is 13-1/2″, a good measure for the mythical average shooter. My 37″ arms and tendency to crawl on the comb beg a longer pull. My head is in the red zone for scopes mounted to suit many riflemen.

No one I know mates up perfectly with a 13-1/2″ stock in summer and winter attire from every shooting position. We adapt to conditions, holding the rifle imperfectly most of the time, but well enough to kill game or nip a 10-ring or the edge of a steel plate — and to see a useful scope field. The eye relief of a scope (distance from rear lens to eye that delivers a full field of view) is somewhat forgiving. The lower the magnification, the less critical the ER. But ideally you position the scope so when you cheek the rifle, your eye naturally falls near the center of the range of acceptable ER.

Real Estate Crunch

Locating a scope on the rifle to this end is getting harder, for two reasons: Ocular assemblies are getting longer, and free tube — the area available to put the rings — is shrinking. Meanwhile, rifle receivers are much the same length, and holes for scope base screws in much the same places as ever.

Diminished free tube comes courtesy internal design changes reducing overall scope length and big turrets with parallax/focus knobs, batteries for reticle illumination and “trajectory-matched” elevation dials. Ocular assemblies have grown with the new internals and ever-wider power ranges.
Given static ring location, scopes are edging rearward, poising to maim the innocent. Long-armed stock-crawlers like me are running out of Band-Aids.

You can push a scope ahead in its mount only to the point of rear-ring contact with the eyepiece or power ring in the rear or, less commonly, front-ring contact with the turret. Of course, extension bases and rings or a Picatinny rail can help you get proper eye relief and protect your brow. To those of us who still care how sporting rifles look, these are cosmetic disappointments. More to my liking is the European solution: a scope with an integral rail accepting clamps securing it to base or rifle. This arrangement is hard to find stateside.

Putting It Together

A week ago, I was sucking air scurrying up a brush-choked coulee. A gap in dawn’s shadows had given me away; the buck was climbing fast. As he hooked around a promontory, I scrambled up the side of the cut, flopped prone and hoped he’d pause. He did, at 300 yards or so, showing just a sliver of rib. He dropped at the shot, a solid “whuck!” following the snap of my .25-06.

As with my other hunting scopes, the ocular lens of the 3-10x Swarovski hangs almost directly above the rear guard screw of my Holehan-built Model 70 — farther forward than most hunters would put it. But for a quick shot, uphill, prone, it’s perfect. I get a full field of view from other positions too. At 4x, eye relief is forgiving, and I’ve yet to need more magnification on game 300 yards off.

The overall length of scopes matters little on the sight-free barrels popular now. But if, like me, you think a hunting rifle naked without an open sight, you’ll appreciate a scope with an objective bell which doesn’t bump the sight when the scope is mounted low and well forward — another thing for traditionalists to ponder.

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