See? An M1 Garand works just fine as a hunting rifle.

It shoots .30-06, which is certainly adequate as a hunting round, so why not the rifle itself? I used my M1A on my first hunting trip. Works just fine. But I opted to change to a different rifle for hunting, mostly due to two things: weight and noise. The M1A is a big heavy rifle. If I was sitting in a blind, who cares. But stalking hunting, that weight gets to you after a while. Plus the gun is noisy on two counts. First, the muzzle brake directed a lot of noise back at you and unless you’re wearing hearing protection (which I stupidly wasn’t on that hunt… finally got a set of Pro Ears Stalker Gold’s coming my way) it’s going to hurt. Second, the gun itself was just noisy… the safety is hard and heavy to click off and makes quite a noise when it does.

Still, it’s a fine rifle and I’m sure I’ll hunt with it again at some point.