The debate over how to sight in a rifle for hunting has gone on for as long as there have been rifles. It's a major topic of discussion at every hunting camp across the nation. Just about everyone out there has their own "favorite" way of sighting in. As long as the end result is the same, the method you use to sight in doesn't matter that much. The goal is to make a quick and clean kill on the game you are hunting.

One of the most popular ways of sighting in is to either zero at 100 yards or sight in an inch or two high at 100 yards. This has worked for countless hunters for years, but I'm going to give you a way to sight in your gun that will save you ammunition at the range and will kill a deer anywhere from 1 to 300 yards out, reliably, and you never have to hold high or low using any reasonable caliber gun.

The ballistics of bullet flight are another hotly debated topic around the camp. There are those who say bullets begin to drop when they leave the barrel, and there are those that say they rise when they leave the barrel. I don't think there is any debate that, over great distances, bullets drop. This is nothing more than gravity. All things fall to Earth eventually. There are many other things that effect bullet flight, such as temperature, humidity, wind, and the drag of the air on the bullet in flight. While all of these must be taken into consideration, gravity is the one thing that effects ballistics more than any other.

Lets put an end to the debate over the path of bullet flight before we go any further. It's true that bullets begin dropping the moment they leave the barrel. This is compensated for by a slight upwards angle in the line of bore which effectively "lobs" the bullet downrange at the target. Therefore, bullets leave the rifle and fly in an arc pattern until they make impact with the Earth. There, it's said - the debate is over. I'm sure there are some of you who still won't believe it, but thats how it works. The bullet flies upward slightly in relation to line of sight out to a point, and then it begins its descent toward the ground.

Now that we've settled the flight path, lets look at optics. Whether you use a scope or open sights, 2 things remain the same for every gun and every shot. The first is that line of sight is a perfectly straight line. The path from your eye, through the sight and to the target is a perfectly straight line, every single time. You can't look in a curved pattern. The second fact about sights is that, scope or ol' iron sights, your sight is mounted higher than your barrel. This means that the arc path of the bullet and the straight line of sight do not match up and make sighting in a gun akin to a science lesson.

To illustrate this, take a look at this diagram:

The line of sight is represented by the straight black line. You can see that the curved path of the bullet crosses this line of sight in 2 distinct places. One very near to the gun and once again quite some distance down range. We can use this known fact to our advantage when it comes to sighting in our deer rifles.

No matter what the gun, or the caliber, the first point of the bullet crossing the line of sight is going to be somewhere close to the 25 yard mark. This holds true for every gun thats considered a "deer rifle", or one that's shooting a muzzle velocity around 2500 fps or higher. The second time it crosses the sight line will be on its descent, and that is going to be somewhere around the 200 yard mark, all the way out to 250 yards depending on the velocity and weight of the bullet.

This little trinket of ballistics knowledge gives us a big advantage in sighting in. The fastest and easiest way to get your gun ready to hunt is to zero it at 25 yards. Yeah, I just said it... 25 yards! Go ahead and try it and see what happens. If you are dead zero at 25 yards, you're going to be very close at 200 yards. And with nearly any caliber, you'll be close enough to kill a deer - 10 inch vital zone - all the way out to 300 yards, or all the way in to 10 yards. You hold the cross hair dead center in the vitals and you're going to hit the vitals, no matter the range. You may be a couple inches high or low, but you're aiming center, so it's a dead deer. We're not trying to drive tacks here, we're putting meat on the ground, and that's just what this will do.

You'll find its quite easy to zero at 25 yards. A quick 3 shot group, adjustment to zero, and another 3 shot group is usually all it takes to zero up. Then, you can practice at 100 and see that you're hitting high, and go on and stretch a couple out to 200 yards and see how close you are back to zero, in case you don't believe me. You may have to adjust a slight bit for windage only at the longer distances, but your zero won't change.

If you're comfortable with the zero you have now, don't change it. Confidence is very important for accuracy, especially when you factor in a good case of buck fever. But if you've got a new gun or new scope to mount, go ahead and give this method of sighting in a try. You'll save yourself some time and ammo, and probably a good bit of frustration.

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