New Cartridge: Winchester 400 Legend

Here's another entry into the ever-growing family of straight-wall rifle cartridges! Winchester has just announced its new 400 Legend, intended for this booming market segment in the US. It's supposed to be a hard-hitting, soft-recoiling cartridge intended for distances you'd expect for whitetail deer hunting.

Winchester's initial unveiling shows the 400 Legend available in the Power Point hunting cartridge line, with a 215-grain lead-tipped bullet moving at 2,250 fps at the muzzle. Winchester claims effective knockdown power on big game and even nasty varmints such as wild hogs out to 300 yards. However, there is a lot of drop-off at that point, as you can see in the ballistics table below.

That's just what you'd expect with a big, heavy bullet moving along at those speeds. But even as velocity decreases, momentum remains decent for a cartridge like this, as that slug still packs considerable punch as it slows. Winchester says the 400 Legend has 20 percent more energy than .30-30 and 25 percent more energy than .350 Legend (and with greater penetration, too!). It has energy equivalent to the familiar 450 Bushmaster, with 20 percent less recoil. However, it doesn't share information as to what ranges those numbers are true at.

Chances are most buyers will be more likely to be considering swapping to the 400 Legend from their old slug gun. In those cases, Winchester says the 400 Legend has twice the energy of a 12 gauge slug at 100 yards, and 55 percent less recoil. Those are big improvements in the numbers that hunters care about.

If some of you are wonder why on earth we'd need another .40-calibre deer hunting cartridge, here's the reasoning. If you read hunting magazines or gun magazines from the US, you might occasionally hear some sort of reference to an "army" of deer hunters (there's a very good example of that here). They aren't kidding. There are literally hundreds of thousands of deer hunters in single states, and they move between states to take advantage of the rules, regulations and better sporting opportunities afforded elsewhere.

Currently, those rules and regulations are promoting the use of so-called "straight-walled" rifle cartridges in some states with excellent hunting opportunities. In the past, some states restricted deer hunters to shotguns during firearms season, but now, in the lower 48 states, all but four allow straight-wall rifle cartridges, which are typically a big improvement over slugs or buckshot. See Remington's map here, illustrating the point. Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and other states that previously had state-wide or regional restrictions on high-powered rifles are now allowing straight-walled cartridges for deer hunting in some zones, or in the whole state.

The reasoning behind this move is, low-pressure straight-wall cartridges are less likely to be involved in accidental shootings than high-powered rounds like the .270 or .30-06. Whether or not this is actually true is another question entirely, but that's the idea.

Interested? See more details on the new round at Winchester's website here.