Why would you ever pay that much

“Why would you ever pay that much for a rifle?” I get this question a lot at a shooting range or just in conversation regarding my guns, namely my blaser lrs2. I showed a couple of my cousin’s friends this week on my grandparent’s farm exactly what you get when you pay for a good rifle. They both had some remington 700 variations in 308 and 30-06. They weren’t bad guns at all, pretty nice really. They actually told me that buying something as expensive as a blaser was a waste of money, they said their rifles would group as tight as any other gun, and all you got when you spent more was a cool look and a good name. I tried to explain that there was more to it, the trigger, stock, action, etc, but they wouldn’t believe me. So I challenged them, we went to the back field where I had a large sheet of plywood on a 4×4 set up for long range shooting. We set up some quarters and such and shot at them. Their rifles were pretty accurate, hitting 1″ targets almost every time. Since we had such a large target I said lets move back a bit, and I took them back to 500 yards. All of our guns were sighted in for 100, so we knew there was going to be a good bit of drop, but we were testing to see how tight the groups were, there was plenty of paper so we could easily see the group sizes. We took turns, one would shoot 3 times and we would mark off the impacts, and the next person would shoot and so on for the 3 of us. I don’t remember their group sizes, but needless to say there were rather large. I think the smallest 3 shot group from them was the 308 rifle at 13 or so inches. My group, however, was small, much smaller than even I expected.

Just under 1.5″. It wasn’t a fluke either, all of my groups were under 2″, and one was smaller than the one in the picture. I could pick off a soda can all day long at nearly 1/3 of a mile with a .223.

That is why you pay that much for a rifle