Is there still a place for the bolt-action fighting rifle?

[Arik]

It seems that Colonel Cooper believed that suppression and fire superiority was best achieved by precision fires on individual targets.

This was tried once in WW1 and it's the reason we have semi auto and select fire. This was later confirmed again in ww2. War started with predominantly bolt action rifles...Enfields, Mauser k98 and Mosins. By the end everyone was fielding Tommy guns, Garands, MP40 Stens and PPSH/PPS. Especially the Russians, who equipped entire squads with nothing but PPSH41s.

Cooper's time has passed. He served a purpose at one point and was a leader in modern fighting tactics and weapons, but he's no longer very relevant.

This^



Bolt action rifles have their place. I play with surplus rifles a little here and there. At one point I had all the major bolt rifles of ww2, now im down to just 303 and 7.62x54. I like the Mosin. It's cheap and fun to shoot and it's a piece of my history but I wouldn't use one in any kind of combat. Maybe. ....maybe with good consistent ammo I'd use a Fin M39 if I were defending a position. The Enfield is a great rifle, fast handling, the No4 has better sights than the old SMLE or the Mosin and higher round capacity. But reloading is still a bitch. Rounds have to be staggered to feed right and the detachable mag was really ment for cleaning not reloading. Even with modern bolt rifles such as the Ruger scout I don't see how cycling the bolt (which sometimes stick) is faster than semi auto or rapid fire semi auto. The other thing that AKs and ARs offer is less recoil and faster sights on target.

I wouldn't say no to bolt action rifle but only if I had a stick and a handgun

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[okie john]

One thing that should probably be stated right out the door is that Jeff Cooper's preferred home defense weapon is the shotgun. He speaks highly of the Lupara - what most of us would call a coach gun, an 18" barreled side-by-side, specifically with hammers - and states that his choice is a pump-action with one round of low-brass #6 birdshot followed up by 00 buck. So I don't think he's necessarily fond of the proposition of using a rifle of any variety for home defense.

While a lot of Cooper’s ideas remain valid, I don’t think there’s any question that we’ve moved past much of his specific advice. But as you read his work, you have to be aware that you can miss a lot of the contradictions in his work if you move too quickly. For example, he recommended the lupara for the masses, but he focused on the repeating shotgun for fighting in To Ride, Shoot Strait, and Speak the Truth, and felt that the semi-auto had significant advantages over the pump.

- He repeatedly points out that he believes the Lee-Enfield No. 4 rifle is a superior arm to the SKS for the common man. It appears that at least part of this is due to him believing that a handful of men with bolt action rifles can rapidly upgrade their armaments by seizing them from the dead.

Cooper had a lot of prejudices, and you have to bear in mind how he let them and his politics influence his work. For instance, he hated the 9mm as much as he loved the 45 ACP, and we still see the legacy of that in major/minor scoring systems even though we know that handgun cartridges are much less different than he swore they were. He also desipsed anything that came from the Warsaw Pact countries, so even though he loved the 30/30 Winchester, he hated the 7.62x39, which is very similar ballistically.

- He states - in developing the rules for practical rifle competition - a desire for there to be only one division for competition, not separate divisions for manually-operated firearms and self-loading firearms. He has quoted an individual as saying, "I shoot a bolt-action instead of a semi-automatic because I do not want to wait for the bolt," which fits into his larger view that a rifleman with a bolt action rifle should have already operated the action by the time his (or her) sights are back on target and that, therefore, the semi-automatic rifle does not possess a practical advantage over the manually-operated rifle. (He also states that he sees no advantage in speed to a lever-action versus a bolt action - speaking for myself, I believe that I can run a bolt action faster than I can run a lever-action.)

I belive that his goal here was to shift attention from equipment to personal excellence. At the time he was writing, older shooters often knew at least something about how to run a bolt gun, while younger shooters did not. They were more interested in the semi-autos of the day (HK battle rifles, FN-FAL, M-14, M-16, AK, SKS, and Dragunov). A lot of younger folks thought that buying a semi, loading it up with bipods and other heavy accessories and then spraying targets with lead was a better approach than shooting carefully with a bolt action that was light enough to carry for extended periods.

Also, in his mind, the M-16 and the 5.56 NATO were NOT combat effective—a real rifle fired something like the 308, 8x57, or 30/06—so he ignored them. When you’re talking about an M-14 or FAL with iron sights fired using the positions that Cooper described in The Art of the Rifle, then yeah, a good man with a bolt gun can hang in there. But if you look at an AR-pattern rifle with optical sights fired from the positions that Kyle Lamb laid out in Green Eyes & Black Rifles, then the bolt gunner will be hoplessly outclassed.

- On a semi-related note, he felt that the Armed Forces of Haiti were, as individual soldiers, better armed than the American soldiers and Marines then poised to invade - as the Haitians were armed with M1 Garands and the Americans with M16s. (The AKM and M1 Carbine also shared Cooper's enmity with the M16.)

Take that with another grain of salt--he also felt that the Colt 1860 revolver was superior to the Beretta M-9.

Clearly, we have the benefit of nearly 20 years of advancements in technology and almost 15 of those years spent actively engaged in conflict and thus have a pretty good grasp on what does and does not work in combat. Perhaps the most obvious is that of the manually-operated rifle versus the automatic, at least in a military context: The British, afterall, dumped the bolt-action L96A1 in use with infantry squads in favor of the semi-automatic (not select-fire) LMT L129A1 for their designated marksmen while the US has bought the M110 and the CSASS, and many people are reporting good results from 5.56mm marksman rifles.

So bearing all this in mind... does the Colonel's advice and opinion still hold water? Is there still a place in the batteries of individuals and within irregular forces for bolt action fighting rifles? Or has the concept been thoroughly outmoded by self-loading rifles from the M1 Garand to the M16 and AK-74 to the SCAR-H and M110?

I spent several years on Special Forces A-Detachments, so I feel that have at least a passing acquaintance with the nuts and bolts of guerrilla warfare. I think bolt guns have a lot of use for the individual, especially for hunting. And if the hunter spends enough time developing the skills it takes to use a bolt gun well in thick brush, which means close, fast shots and running the bolt hard, then he or she will give up very little to the individual shooter armed with a semi-auto. But for military operations in urban terrain, I’ll take the semi-auto every time.

If I had to put together a neighborhood militia, I’d definitely want a couple of good scoped deer rifles IF they were in the hands of people who know how to shoot them well. Couple that with a gaggle of high-grade semi-autos and pallets of ammo for the less talented among us, and you’d be able to defend your subdivision until the flood waters receded.


Okie John

[TiroFijo]

IMO, Cooper was so full of prejudices and had strong opinions on matters where he lacked up-to-date technical knowledge that you have to take everything he wrote with a good dose of salt...

[Pilot1]

I have an Enfield No. 1 Mk III, and a Mauser K98k. They are both wonderful bolt gun battle rifles. Relevant? Yes, they can still be effective obviously. That being said, I'd still rather have an FAL, G3, M14, French MAS 49/56, or M4/M16, but would not want to be on the receiving end of .303 British nor 8MM Mauser out of a bolt gun.

[Meta-Prometheus]

I would say they still have their place and use these days. It's mostly understanding their limitations. There are more appropriate firearms these days that would serve the average person much better. However not everybody can afford the modern offerings or maybe they simply have no interest in them.

[turnburglar]

Sun Tzu would probably have more relevant advice than Jeff Cooper.

[Captiva]

Glad to see a number of fellow Stanford grads and UC master degree holders questioning and criticizing Cooper's mental abilities.

[mack7.62]

I wish I had that poster from a few years back "How else can you arm 5 guys for $300" with the Mosin-Nagant's. A few basic cheap bolt actions might be handy to have around in bad times, not everyone will deserve a top notch tricked out AR just handed to them. As far as Cooper keep in mind his time, it took a long time to get where we are today and the techniques he taught helped us get here. Before internet and DVD's is was all print or personal instruction, how many shoot houses were around in the 60's, mostly just KD on a range. Jeff was one of the first pushing drawing from a holster and using two hands.

[PrivateCitizen]

IMO, Cooper was so full of prejudices and had strong opinions on matters where he lacked up-to-date technical knowledge that you have to take everything he wrote with a good dose of salt...

I think this is accurate.

As much as I like his Scout notion and am drawn by its nostalgia that time has come and gone. The 308 AR class is close to eclipsing most of the definition of the 'fighting bolt action.' They don't all 'make weight' in the most rigid of terms but are potentially close enough now to make the differences academic, IMO.

Were he still present I suspect he'd be so rigid on his own views as to deny the modern benefits. I doubt he'd have evolved with the times. The old guard is struggling.

[MountainRaven]

I've noticed him speak on occasion of his HK91, so I wouldn't say that he was entirely set in his ways and it seems that he softened over time on the Glock. Might even have really liked to handle a PredatAR or SCAR. He certainly didn't express any misgivings about an automatic scout, beyond weight.

But I think that the ability to travel with a bolt action scout, particularly internationally, would have been - and might still be - seen as a definite advantage.

I don't doubt that he'd still be anchored to the 45-caliber, to the 1911, and to the 308. I think he was tied to his experiences in the Pacific and Korea, but I don't think he was so rigid to not evolve with the times. I think the evolution of some of his students and contemporaries, like Ken Hackathorn, Ed Head, Louis Awerbuck, Gabe Suarez, Pat Rogers, &c., should give some indication of where he might have been today.