.243 Winchester: What's your take?

Planning on picking up a Marlin X7 in .243 win.

Grew up hunting deer with .308, .270 and 30-30. Have a co-worker who swears by .243 for deer so I'd like to add one to my safe.

I let my gf shoot my .308. She also grew up shooting so knows what she's doing, however the .308 is too much and hurts. Will be nice to have something she will enjoy shooting.
 
All this talk about 243's got me thinking yesterday, and then it got me moving. I had all the parts fall into place for a sporter weight 243 on a 700 so I got busy and put it together.
Action is a mid-80's from a 308 BDL that I trued up and had Bill Leeper reblue last winter when he built my 308 Norma. Stock is a new B&C Medalist with aluminium bedding that I got from Supercub a few months back. Then I picked up a new unfired SPS 24" 243 barrel from 556NATO on the EE a few days ago.
Here's the result...weighs 8-1/2lbs with the 4-12X Elite 3000 on top.
Should make a decent 'yote rifle if I ever have occasion to point it at one.

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Threads like these are an ongoing thing on every forum dedicated to hunting and shooting. No one debates too long on the merits of the 270Win for deer, but the same topic and the 243Win seem to go on and on and on.

The way I see it is that as soon as you venture onto the cusp of adequate perfomance, the wide ranging observations come onto the table and the issue becomes mired in contradiction. Why the contradictions, because at best things are marginal on deer with a 243Win, and hence perfomance is all over the map.

Move that same 270Win into the moose/elk discussion, and you get more contradictions, and even more varying accounts of performance...why, because your onto the upper end of the cartridges suitable application range.

These thread are great, if you can disect the hidden meaning from them.

If a cartridge gets mired in all sorts of varying on game performance accounts and opinions, it is likely not the optimum choice...... likely there are better choices of cartridges for said application.

Choose wisely what ever you choose.

And like some writer said.

" I don't want the cartridge that does the job when everthing is right, I want a cartridge that gets the job done when everything goes wrong."
 
Normally I'd be singing the praises of the 6.5x55 but since such rifles are rare and pricey I got myself a H&R single shot Handi rifle in .243 last year and after a trip to the range I now consider it my primary deer rifle.

I can hardly wait to load up some TSX bullets for it this deer season or whatever unleaded bullets are around these days. :)
 
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