Short People- The Second Yoga Blog

“Now”, said the yoga DVD narrator, “stand in mountain pose and simply fold forward at the waist, legs straight, knees locked and place your hands flat on the floor”. Right. Place this flat on the floor lady.

And this brings us to rifle barrels and the question, are longer barrels inherently more accurate? One might think so given the long tubes on sniper-type rifles. But let’s check this out.

On my 5.56 build I have a 16 inch Wilson barrel and it shoots sub m.o.a. consistently. I have longer barreled rifles that cannot match this. More important is barrel quality and twist rate. My 300 BLK build’s original cheapest-I-could-find barrel was horrible, doing 8-10 inch groups at 100 yds. I got a 16 inch Wilson barrel from the shop and it now shoots much better. I haven’t shot for best group yet, but casual plinking groups of 1.5 m.o.a. are fine with me.

Now, I have also shot a number of iron sighted rifles and the longer barreled guns almost always yield better groups. And I have witnessed the same results from my fellow shooters. BUT, these guns were all iron sighted. Add an optical sight and the barrel length becomes insignificant.

So, I think the answer is no.  Kind of.

As far as group size at normal ranges, I don’t think the length of barrel matters much if at all. It has never seemed to make a difference to me, given a good optic on the gun. If you are using iron sights, the longer sight radius will definitely make a difference in how accurate you can shoot the gun, but that doesn't mean the barrel itself has more inherent accuracy potential.

Will a longer barrel group better at extreme-for-the-caliber ranges? Very likely it will. But not due to inherent barrel accuracy. Lemme ‘splain Lucy. With a longer barrel on a rifle, to a point at least, you may well realize an increase in velocity due to efficiency. You will be allowing more time for powder to burn and propel the bullet where a shorter barrel might waste burning powder on muzzle flash. This higher velocity will result in shorter travel time to the target, thus reducing the impact of wind drift, bullet drop and Coriolis effect. Reducing these factors will help with group size.

So there you have it, Blog Sarge’s take on the long and short of barrels. 

Cheers and happy shooting.