The 260 Remington is an excellent rifle cartridge if you are looking to hunt medium size game animals and are sensitive to recoil. It’s important to know that recoil sensitivity is a combination of many factors: amount of recent practice shooting firearms, physical fitness, shoulder and joint health and the neurological pain threshold. There is no reason not to ‘step down’ in caliber and ‘step up’ in practice shooting that caliber if your body is better served by a lower recoiling weapon. A famous American actor once said “a man has to know his limits.” If your body is saying ‘step down’ … put the macho aside and step down. There is a reason.

One such solution to the recoil problem of the medium rifles is the 260 Remington. It is a 308 Winchester cartridge necked down to shoot 0.26” diameter bullets. A 308 Winchester cartridge firing a 150gr projectile produces 2650 ft-lbf of kinetic energy at the muzzle. A 260 Remington cartridge shooting a 140gr projectile produces 2250 ft-lbf of kinetic energy at the muzzle. This accounts for the reduction in recoil—it produces less kinetic energy at the muzzle than the 308 Winchester. Bottlenecked cartridges require very specialized propellant in order to outperform the host cartridge that has less cartridge taper or ’bottlenecking’. This helps to explain the disparity in performance between the two cartridges.