The M1 continues to amaze!

My coworker puts on an ATF party every now and then - a taste of whiskey, cigars, and plenty of shooting (bring your own gun) and one of the last ones I went to I brought out the old war horse M1 rifle. He owns much property and we shoot into the canyon behind his house where he has a white acetylene bottle with the bottom cut off tied up in a tree as a gong 494 yards from his back yard. The bottle is about 5 feet tall and about 12" in diameter.

I shot the bottle with an AR and then a long range hunting rifle before I grabbed a soft case and said "now this is a real rifle!" As I uncased the IHC Garand everyone recognized what it was but I think they thought of it as an outdated grandpa gun.

I rolled the elevation to 500 yds, threw the rifle up on against a makeshift rest we were using and squeezed one off: BANG........gongggggggggg. No one could believe it (especially on a first shot - cold bore) and there may have been a bit of luck involved, but that was the memorable shot of the weekend that coworkers were talking about the next day at work.

My grandpa always talked with fondness about the M1's prowess at 500 yards compared to all the other service weapons a WWII GI had at his disposal and that performance just reminds me of those range stories grandpa used to tell about basic training before shipping off to Okinawa.