newbie with pal, was embarrassed to talk at gun shop

[harbl_the_cat]

Welcome to the forum and the sport.

I'll add a general nugget of info that applies with EVERY discipline of shooting you get into:

Whatever your budget is, buy the most inexpensive gun you can to do the kind of shooting you want to, and spend the bulk of your money on ammo and practice.

I'm quite serious about reloading and "practical" marksmanship, and currently I'm running 2x Mossberg MVP Patrol Rifle's in .223 and 1x Ruger American Predator in .223.

I also have a Remington 700 SPS Tactical and Savage Model 10 TR both in .308.

Nothing there is particularly high end, but with the right load, I can consistently land 1.5-2 MOA groups and hit a 20" plate at 500 meters with all 5 of those guns (I've yet to shoot further with the .308's - but I'm confident I could do it).

I won't win any competitions with that level of performance, but I can get a LOT of data and practice all the important skills of rifle marksmanship with those capabilities (my frame of reference is as a former Canadian Army Small Arms Training range operator).

I'd say any 1 of those are perfect builds for a new rifle shooters to learn the basics of rifle marksmanship.

If I were new into the sport, I'd have picked just 1, it's a toss up between either the Ruger AP or the Mossberg MVP if I just wanted to learn rifle marksmanship... it's too much of a toss up with my .308's for hunting... although I also have a Marlin XL7 I bought and never really shot that would probably be a better hunting rifle than either the Remington 700 or the Savage 10 TR.

To just my .223's I have reloading components to load about 10k rounds (my 300 yard "Plinking loads" and 500 yard "Precision loads").

To my .308's, I only have enough reloading components to load about 1500 such loads, so I'm spending more of my time trying to source more large rifle components so I can load and shoot more.

I have a personal reloaders philosophy of: "For every plinking round I load to shoot, I want to load and save 2 to shoot 20 years in the future" (It's 1:1 for my precision rounds).

(One thing to note, though is a .223 is too underpowered for most big game hunting - but I'm more interested in target shooting than hunting, and shooting/reloading .223 is more inexpensive compared to shooting/reloading a .308, which itself is pretty cheap among other large rifle calibers.)