When I started looking over a year ago, for what was the current most practical, powerful/effective widely accepted and commercially produced public land legal deer hunting cartridge my research kept bringing me back to the 450 Bushmaster.
But in about 40% of write ups for the 450BM I read kept stressing due to it being a straight wall cartridge it's inability to achieve "great accuracy", and do not expect from it the accuracy you get from bottled necked cartridges. Grant you this was with factory ammo, but I admit it put me off the cartridge a bit. But I also realized I had at this point absolutely zero experience shooting any straight walled rifle cartridges let alone reloading for one.
Than I came across this website and saw the 450 BM was indeed capable of very good accuracy out of bolt, semi-autos and single shot rifle platforms and did so in a large number of them and my 450BM accuracy concerns were laid to rest.
My first range session proved to me beyond all doubt the 450BM is indeed capable of very good accuracy and in the case of most of my reloads excellent accuracy. I have also seen a large enough number of 100 yard three shot groups posted here showing excellent accuracy to know the 450BM is capable of excellent accuracy, granted using reloaded ammo. Even my 100 yard group using Hornady Custom Factory 450BM ammo was well within acceptable accuracy standards for a 100% factory rifle shooting factory ammo at 1.1".
I'm not saying most gun writers who have done accuracy reviews of the 450BM are saying it lacks accuracy as a matter of fact most did not. I was just surprised its a larger number than I expected.
Any idea as to why this is?
I chose the 450 Bushmaster over the 350 Legend, 458 SOCOM, 50 Beowulf, 500 S&W because first and foremost it made the most economic sense and because none of the other calibers offered any advantage(s) in terms of ballistics performance or on game performance advantages over the 450 Bushmaster.
And lastly the 450 Bushmaster is the only 45 caliber straight walled public land legal cartridge available in Bolt Rife platform.
In my opinion in the class of commercially produced 1.7" public land deer cartridges you just can not beat the 450 Bushmaster by any applicable performance criteria.