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Can Minute of Angle (MOA) Really Be True?
by Paul Helinski & Ben Becker
Pick up just about any gun magazine these days and you will see ads for MOA accuracy, guaranteed, out of the box. MOA means “minute of angle,” which is 1/60th of one degree of radius. It seems like a great selling point and I’m sure it sells a lot of guns, but I wondered if the claims were actually true. If you don’t understand MOA it is understandable. what does a fraction of a circle have to do with the accuracy of a rilfe? But we’ll get to that.
Not everyone is capable of shooting MOA, even with the most accurate rifle, so I employed our local neighborhood US Army Sniper (and GunsAmerica Magazine contributor), Ben Becker. The results are astounding. All of the rifles we tested (and we didn’t just test rifles that advertise MOA) shot into or nearly into a minute of angle at 100 yards. Some even did it for 10 and more rounds in a row, without cool down. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are living in the Golden Age of firearms manufacturing. This is incredible stuff.
Please don’t take this as a “head to head” comparison for these rifles against each other or against other rifles in the market we didn’t test. The list of guns we tested is in no way comprehensive. We were able to get rifles from Beretta (Sako, Tikka), Savage, Thompson Center and CZ. Noticeably absent are of course Remington, Browning, Winchester, Weatherby, Ruger and others. This article was not meant to be comprehensive. We just wanted to see what is going on out there in some quality production rifles and these are the ones we could get. There is no reason to believe that the rifles missing from this test wouldn’t perform just as soundly as the rifles we were able to shoot.
Accuracy Defined
The world “accuracy” as it applies to a rifle may not be what you think it is. Some people consider a rifle “accurate” if it shoots to point of aim. True “accuracy” is not whether it shoots to point of aim. That it just a matter of sight adjustment. True “accuracy” is how consistent, shot to shot, the rifle is, removing all human error and other variables.
No rifle is 100% accurate. Even if held in a vise and the trigger pulled by a robot, no rifle will shoot through the exact same hole every time. Even the most precise competition rifles may appear to be 100% accurate at 100 yards, but will show a sub-minute of angle deviation at 200 or 500 yards. A “minute of angle” or MOA, is 1/60th of 1/360th of a circle (each degree is split into 60 minutes), like degrees on a compass. The actual measured span of this type of angular measurement changes as you move further from the target. One minute of angle at 100 yards equals one inch (1.047 actually). At 200 yards this actual measurement on the target is two inches, three hundred is three inches, and so on. Yards and inches conveniently give this relationship. Think of it like the beam of a flashlight on a foggy day. As you get further away the light circle gets bigger on what it hits. This “minute of angle” span also gets bigger as you get further away. This is accuracy.
When a rifle is advertised as “MOA” out of the box, it is telling you that it is guaranteed to shoot a number of bullets, all human and environmental factors removed of course, into one inch at 100 yards. Some manufacturers don’t specify the number of bullets in a row they guarantee, some do. And sometimes that number is 3 and sometimes it is 5.
Real World Shooting
Accuracy only matters when you apply it to your actual application, or applications. Nobody buys a hunting rifle for it to just sit in the safe. You expect to and are going to be out hunting with it. What you hunt is going to determine how you expect a MOA rifle to perform. If you are a deer hunter, an advertised 3 shot MOA gun might be just fine. You don’t expect to take more than one shot ideally, and three shots in the space of two inches at 200 yards is surgical enough to get the job done for sure.
If you are hunting hogs, prairie dogs or other critters that don’t have bag limits and upon which you can stumble on a whole bunch of them hanging out for the pickings, 5 shots may not even be enough. How the barrel performs after several rounds heat the gun up will matter to you, and matter a great deal. And don’t discount the use of a modern hunting rifle as a tactical weapon. Accuracy is accuracy, and in a tactical situation, who knows what kind of sustained fire you might need out of the gun.
It would be much “safer” for us to just test these guns at 3 shots each, and we did start out the tests with 3 shot test targets. But we aren’t here for proving marketing claims. Aren’t you curious if the MOA guns are barely in the ballpark of MOA at 3 or 5 rounds, or if they consistently deliver MOA over 10 or more rounds? We were.
The good news is that the rifles did perform, not just in three and five shot groups, but also in ten and twenty shot groups. Holding even an inch and a half over 10 rounds with no cool down time is thought to be impossible for a “thin barreled” hunting rifle. But we proved that this new generation of rifle technology is like no other. You may not see it in any marketing claims, but in our basic testing with brown box Hornady Ammunition, we found that you can count on these guns even when you heat them up.
by Paul Helinski & Ben Becker
Pick up just about any gun magazine these days and you will see ads for MOA accuracy, guaranteed, out of the box. MOA means “minute of angle,” which is 1/60th of one degree of radius. It seems like a great selling point and I’m sure it sells a lot of guns, but I wondered if the claims were actually true. If you don’t understand MOA it is understandable. what does a fraction of a circle have to do with the accuracy of a rilfe? But we’ll get to that.
Not everyone is capable of shooting MOA, even with the most accurate rifle, so I employed our local neighborhood US Army Sniper (and GunsAmerica Magazine contributor), Ben Becker. The results are astounding. All of the rifles we tested (and we didn’t just test rifles that advertise MOA) shot into or nearly into a minute of angle at 100 yards. Some even did it for 10 and more rounds in a row, without cool down. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are living in the Golden Age of firearms manufacturing. This is incredible stuff.
Please don’t take this as a “head to head” comparison for these rifles against each other or against other rifles in the market we didn’t test. The list of guns we tested is in no way comprehensive. We were able to get rifles from Beretta (Sako, Tikka), Savage, Thompson Center and CZ. Noticeably absent are of course Remington, Browning, Winchester, Weatherby, Ruger and others. This article was not meant to be comprehensive. We just wanted to see what is going on out there in some quality production rifles and these are the ones we could get. There is no reason to believe that the rifles missing from this test wouldn’t perform just as soundly as the rifles we were able to shoot.
Accuracy Defined
The world “accuracy” as it applies to a rifle may not be what you think it is. Some people consider a rifle “accurate” if it shoots to point of aim. True “accuracy” is not whether it shoots to point of aim. That it just a matter of sight adjustment. True “accuracy” is how consistent, shot to shot, the rifle is, removing all human error and other variables.
No rifle is 100% accurate. Even if held in a vise and the trigger pulled by a robot, no rifle will shoot through the exact same hole every time. Even the most precise competition rifles may appear to be 100% accurate at 100 yards, but will show a sub-minute of angle deviation at 200 or 500 yards. A “minute of angle” or MOA, is 1/60th of 1/360th of a circle (each degree is split into 60 minutes), like degrees on a compass. The actual measured span of this type of angular measurement changes as you move further from the target. One minute of angle at 100 yards equals one inch (1.047 actually). At 200 yards this actual measurement on the target is two inches, three hundred is three inches, and so on. Yards and inches conveniently give this relationship. Think of it like the beam of a flashlight on a foggy day. As you get further away the light circle gets bigger on what it hits. This “minute of angle” span also gets bigger as you get further away. This is accuracy.
When a rifle is advertised as “MOA” out of the box, it is telling you that it is guaranteed to shoot a number of bullets, all human and environmental factors removed of course, into one inch at 100 yards. Some manufacturers don’t specify the number of bullets in a row they guarantee, some do. And sometimes that number is 3 and sometimes it is 5.
Real World Shooting
Accuracy only matters when you apply it to your actual application, or applications. Nobody buys a hunting rifle for it to just sit in the safe. You expect to and are going to be out hunting with it. What you hunt is going to determine how you expect a MOA rifle to perform. If you are a deer hunter, an advertised 3 shot MOA gun might be just fine. You don’t expect to take more than one shot ideally, and three shots in the space of two inches at 200 yards is surgical enough to get the job done for sure.
If you are hunting hogs, prairie dogs or other critters that don’t have bag limits and upon which you can stumble on a whole bunch of them hanging out for the pickings, 5 shots may not even be enough. How the barrel performs after several rounds heat the gun up will matter to you, and matter a great deal. And don’t discount the use of a modern hunting rifle as a tactical weapon. Accuracy is accuracy, and in a tactical situation, who knows what kind of sustained fire you might need out of the gun.
It would be much “safer” for us to just test these guns at 3 shots each, and we did start out the tests with 3 shot test targets. But we aren’t here for proving marketing claims. Aren’t you curious if the MOA guns are barely in the ballpark of MOA at 3 or 5 rounds, or if they consistently deliver MOA over 10 or more rounds? We were.
The good news is that the rifles did perform, not just in three and five shot groups, but also in ten and twenty shot groups. Holding even an inch and a half over 10 rounds with no cool down time is thought to be impossible for a “thin barreled” hunting rifle. But we proved that this new generation of rifle technology is like no other. You may not see it in any marketing claims, but in our basic testing with brown box Hornady Ammunition, we found that you can count on these guns even when you heat them up.
More here including there test;
http://www.gunsamerica.com/blog/minute-of-...out-of-the-box/
One correction from the article as reflected in this comment;
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Paul and Ben,
I really enjoyed reading your Out of the Box Accuracy article. I noticed, however, that at the beginning of the piece (and again under the Accuracy Defined paragraph), you said, “MOA means “minute of angle,” which is 1/360th of a circle.” That is incorrect. 1/360th of a circle is one degree. One MOA is 1/60th of one degree, or 1/21,600th of a circle, or about 1 inch at 100 yards (as you correctly stated later in the article).
I really enjoyed reading your Out of the Box Accuracy article. I noticed, however, that at the beginning of the piece (and again under the Accuracy Defined paragraph), you said, “MOA means “minute of angle,” which is 1/360th of a circle.” That is incorrect. 1/360th of a circle is one degree. One MOA is 1/60th of one degree, or 1/21,600th of a circle, or about 1 inch at 100 yards (as you correctly stated later in the article).