Three counter points:
1) Your article was probably written to disprove the old wives tale about how .30 cals can shoot thru brush. Heck, even .50 cal BMG rounds deflect. I have never felt that was an ethical shot to "shoot thru the bushes" and had nothing to do with my decision making process.
2)
30-30 is barely a step above a slug gun IMO.
I bet that opinion is based on scores of highly biased outdoors writers being paid by advertisers. And those advertisers were blowing the horn for the latest and greatest whatevers. If it was old fashioned, it was to be abandoned because everything new is better. My decisions were based on numbers and modern science. Have you seen the numbers for the Hornady LEVERevolution MonoFlex rounds in 30-30? Better than 2,000 ft pounds of energy at the muzzle, near onto flat shooting at the 200 yd mark and retaining a significant amount of that energy due to G1 Ballistic Coefficient of .330 and a sectional density of .241. Plus, unlike the most highly rated and subsequently overrated bonded lead core bullet, these copper rounds have all but 100% weight retention, expansion that is near flawless, resulting in superior terminal ballistics. I recently read an article saying that the short magnums were now out of favor with the gun crowd when just a few years ago if you weren't carrying something that ended with WSM, you just weren't in the game.
3) Last year I ending up passing on three bucks, all bigger than the one I was able to take. And in all three situations they were no further than 65 yds, AND to make matters worse, the scope on the .243 was the reason all three times. Had I been carrying iron sights, all three would have been slam dunks. Year after year, I have shot deer no further than 65 yds, with two exceptions. One was a buck at 90 yds with my flintlock and the other was a doe at 140 yds with my caplock. The 140 yarder was an anomaly, but I took the shot because I had literally thrown a hundred dollars worth of powder down the barrel of that same gun that summer shooting for quarters offhand at a 140 yd gong at the club's range. It was cake.
Yeah, there are long range shots on the prairie of South Dakota, but I will be hunting the Black Hills for the most part and this will do me more than fine. The two tags I have are, in effect, management tags and landowners have signed up to have deer taken out of their haystacks and farmyards. I should be able to get'er done with the old "dirty-dirty".
