We’ll be the first to admit that we continue to be enamored with the pursuit of accuracy. Fine-tuning our deer rifles for precision performance out to 200 yards and beyond is an ongoing game. Can’t help it. Spending too much money on optics, upgrading triggers, swapping barrels, and the never-ending load testing absorbs time and finances xe2x80x94 but we’ll never stop. It’s a disease, for sure, and we love it.

Nevertheless, we do try to keep it all in perspective. That aspect of our hunting lifestyle is just another facet of the larger hobby and it’s important to keep that perspective in terms of whitetail hunting. Why? When we step back and ask ourselves how far our typical whitetail shot is taken, the answer is within the 100-yard zone. WAY within 100 yards. In fact, I have made only one 100-yard shot on a buck. Almost all of them are in the 40- to 75-yard range. In over 35 years of hunting whitetails, I have yet to take a shot over 100 yards.

My experience is similar to that of most hunters who hunt in woodland environments. Sure, if you hunt open country or along ag fields, you are going to be offered shots at those longer distances.

The point is, it’s easy to get wrapped up in long-range shooting setups, and it certainly is a fun and challenging endeavor, but for hunting whitetails, it isn’t necessary for most of us.

I’ve come to enjoy using a shotgun for much of my whitetail hunting, even though my state isn’t one of those that has restrictions on centerfire/bottleneck cartridges. The reason? I love the quick, decisive verdict a .50-caliber slug hands down on a buck. That rowdy slug is also a bonus when I’m hunting in close, brushy conditions. With all that mass and momentum of that heavy bullet, I don’t worry much that a wayward branch is going to muff the shot at my typical shooting distances. I know that when I settle the sights on a deer’s vitals and pull the trigger, that buck will be hooves-up in seconds.

If you live in a state with restrictions on centerfire rifles, there are several ways to go to set up for hunting deer with a shotgun.

Smoothbore Shotguns

In the old days, a lot of hunters started out (even in states with no cartridge restrictions) using their squirrel and grouse shotguns for deer hunting. Several ammo manufacturers offered shotgun slug cartridges that incorporated the ribbed Foster slug, which was designed to provide some semblance of short-range accuracy and good terminal performance on deer-sized critters from a smooth-bore (non-rifled) shotgun barrel.

The Foster slug is like an air rifle pellet on steroids. It’s a big hunk of lead that’s hollowed out in the back, which places most of the weight up front. This slug also features linear spiraled grooving that helps the slug to establish uniformity as it is pushed down the barrel and permits the slug to pass through an improved cylinder bore (the tightest choke recommended for use with a Foster slug). It is this significant weight-forward bias and the trailing “skirt” that provide the stability to be accurate at closer distances.

Foster slugs are still the common go-to ammo for deer hunters looking to deploy their smoothbore shotgun for deer hunting. Brenneke slugs are also good bets. These feature a solid lead slug (unlike the hollowed-out Fosters) that utilizes a wad integrated into the back of the slug for flight stabilization.

Fiber Optic Sights

Setting up a smoothbore shotgun for deer hunting will require testing different slug types and manufacturers before finding one that your gun likes best. Before you hit the test range, though, you will need to address the sighting system. Most smoothbore shotguns come with a simple bead sight. That’s great for small game and upland birds xe2x80x94 not so much for hunting deer.

If your shotgun has a ribbed barrel, an easy upgrade is to install a fiber-optic sight system. A good example of this is the TRUxe2x80xa2POINT XTREME from TRUGLO. This is a universal sight system that quickly installs on the barrel rib. It includes two interchangeable rear sights and is adjustable for windage and elevation so you can zero your shotgun for the optimal distance and group size your choice of ammo can deliver.

Rifled Slug Barrels

Although smoothbore shotguns, tested to find the most accurate slug and zeroed for reliable shot placement, have killed a great many deer, no combination of smoothbore barrel and Foster- or Brenneke-style slug will have the accuracy potential or diversity in ammo terminal performance as will a dedicated rifled barrel shooting sabot slugs.

A rifled shotgun barrel (more accurately, a rifle barrel affixed to a shotgun-style receiver) or a “slug gun,” has, of course, a barrel with rifling cuts. These are designed to be used with conventional sabot slug ammunition.

With sabot slug ammo, the bullet xe2x80x94 which is typically of a lead-core, copper jacketed ballistic-tip design in the 300- to 400-grain range xe2x80x94 is seated in a sabot and the bullet/sabot assembly sits in a conventional-style shotgun cartridge hull. Unlike standard bullets shot from a conventional rifle, the bullet in sabot slug ammo does not engage the slug barrel rifling. Instead, rifling-induced gyroscopic spin comes from the sabot engaging the slug barrel’s rifling. Sometime after the bullet/sabot exit the muzzle, the sabot drops away and the bullet continues to the target, taking advantage of its superior ballistic performance (compared to the Foster- and Brenneke-style slugs).

Nearly all sabot slugs incorporate ballistic tips to promote expansion on impact. These tips also improve the bullet’s ballistic coefficient, allowing them to retain greater velocity and flatter downrange trajectories than the older-style slugs.

In short, modern sabot slug ammunition provides the accuracy and terminal performance to drop big game quickly and with precision not only at typical deer hunting distances, but also out to 150 and even 200 yards, with the right setup.

Ensuring that accuracy potential and terminal performance is maximized xe2x80x94 especially at those longer distances xe2x80x94 depends on good shot placement. For that, we advise fitting your slug gun with a quality optic. We’re not talking about a high-power, way-out-there scope with a fancy BDC reticle or anything like that.

Red Dots

For woodland environments, where the typical shot distance is under 75 yards, a red dot optic works great. It’s smaller and lighter than a scope, but more importantly, a red dot delivers super-fast sight acquisition, which can be important if you hunt in brushy country with close-quarter engagements being the norm. A red dot, such as the TRUxe2x80xa2TEC Micro sub-compact open red dot sight is ideal.

The TRUxe2x80xa2TEC Micro offers a generous 23x17mm lens and a sharp 3 MOA reticle that allows you to get on target quickly. You won’t have to worry about trying to find that buck in your scope because the TRUxe2x80xa2TEC’s open, non-magnified view means you never lose sight of your target. This optic also comes with several features we like in a hunting sight system, such as adjustable brightness settings to match ambient light conditions, shock- and water-resistance, and an auto-off feature to preserve battery life. The latter is especially welcome because we almost ALWAYS forget to turn off our illuminated reticles!

Scopes

For many hunters, one measure of their rifle setup is the scope. Yeah, there’s just something about a big ol’ honkin’ optic that screams long-range performance. Truth is, in the deer woods most of us hunt, bigger isn’t better, and often as not, bigger can be detrimental: too much weight, too much bulk, too much magnification … just too much all the way around.

In our experience, an optimal slug gun scope need have no more than 4X magnification. In fact, 4X is usually where we keep our centerfire rifles set. Any more than that is usually unnecessary in the deer woods and it is certainly more than adequate for a slug gun that will likely see action inside of 150 yards.

We recently setup our Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag with TRUGLO’s TRUxe2x80xa2BRITE 30 Hunter model, and it has proven spot-on for our woodland hunting needs. Although the 4X maximum magnification is all we would want, the ability to dial back to zero magnification (1X) is also welcome should we find ourselves in close-quarter hunting conditions that demand low- to no magnification, such as when hog hunting. Thus, the TRUxe2x80xa2BRITE 30 Hunter covers the spectrum of a slug gun’s effective range.

Another feature that lends the TRUxe2x80xa2BRITE 30 Hunter to a slug gun application is its wide field of view and 30mm tube. We often find shotgun platforms to be, shall we say, a tad less ergonomic than conventional centerfire rifle stocks xe2x80x94 at least in terms of cheek weld height and length of pull. As a result, we like an optic that makes for quick sight alignment in a firearm originally designed to aim low along the barrel rib.

Hunting whitetails with a shotgun used to be a make-do proposition for many sportsmen. Today, with diverse retrofit sight options, dedicated slug barrels, and sophisticated ammunition that delivers high accuracy and knockdown power beyond 100 yards, the case for slug gun hunting has never been stronger. You may even find that a fine-tuned slug gun is the optimal platform for you style of hunting, whether you live in a shotgun-only state/zone or not.

xe2x80x94 PAID PARTNER CONTENT. This content is brought to you by a D&DH advertising sponsor.

TRUGLO Optics for Killer Accuracy