If 30-06 is your top & immediate priority, you should join a rifle club, start with .22 and then move on to the 30-06. Forget about air guns. Apply for a license under sportsmanship criteria and having a rifle club membership carries a lot more weight and leaves virtually no ground for refusal. You may start with a 30-06, but cost of ammo and the 50 round ammo quota make it difficult for you to crack the renowned shot competition/event and get higher no. of rounds. Getting a license these days is a big deal, especially with our dutiful police officers.K1eaner wrote:
BUT. Most importantly is to attain license and get that 30.06 rifle.
Air rifles provide a very basic ground for learning the fundamentals of marksmanship. But the major difference is , springers are held loose to allow as much recoil as possible, firearms with a tight grip. In clubs to my best knowledge, air rifles are not allowed beyond 10 m. If you have 20-30 m open space, no need to join a club for shooting, you can do it just at home, provided you decide for an Indian gun. Precihole and SDB make fine guns you can check them out. Then move on to a high end foreign PCP. Moreover the guns mentioned above give you the opportunity to learn basic gunsmithing also, a very helpful skill indeed. If long range shooting is what you want, get a AA s510, will let you shoot upto 100 m. But begin shooting with a more basic air rifle, same goes for fire arms. It makes you a overall better shot and lets you know the exact qualities you will want in your next upgraded buy, which a third person review can never give.
Regarding long range shooting, you mention spin drift. To my limited knowledge , that comes into play if the target is atleast 500 m away, in India, if you have a range 400m, even 300 m facilities consider yourself lucky. First start shooting at 100m, then think about 600+ yard shots, and take into account wind speed, Coriolis effect, humidity, temperature , barometric pressure , bullet drop and how much powder you should put in the cartridge.
Import of firearms is banned until you are a renowned shot, and some pre -1980s Winchester model 70 you can find in a shop, the Indian IOF .30-06 is what you can get. And the optics required is another issue.
Bottom line is , get a gun( air/powder burner/anything) and start shooting.
Added in 2 minutes 59 seconds:
Basu wrote:Dear sam47,
I have a view that during last three years , Indian air gun manufacturing have improved significantly.
Precihole was the 1st Indian Company who came with high standard ARs along with technology.
Soon it was followed by SDB with variants.
Armar showed a lot of promise at the early stage , hope they will bounce back again.
Under the proposed rule of 15 fpe , the manufacturers have already pushed their products upto that limit.
After sale service ,has also improved simultaneously.
A beginner can choose a rifle from 2.6 - 4.0 kgs and power from 5- 14.5 fpe.
What we lack is high standard pellets.
These days India needs to have standard pellet manufacturers.
So for a beginner now , there are options , unlike old days.
Basu
Could not agree any more. Good time to be an air rifle hobbyist. I hope pellet manufacturers will soon get to it , for there is now demand.
