Summary
When the Outdoor Life Gun and Optics test team assembled on the frozen, windswept plains of eastern Montana in early March, the task that lay ahead of us was at once familiar and formidable. After all, this is the fifteenth year that we’ve conducted our annual evaluation of the newest firearms and sporting optics (and by now we’re used to performing the test in sub optimal conditions), but the fields of guns and glass for 2015 were large and more diverse than any we’d ever seen. It was clear that we had our work cut out for us. The rifle category includes everything from budget-priced bolt guns to competition ARs and perhaps the finest all-around hunting rifle ever built. Two remarkable over/unders were sure to be the highlights of the shotgun field—until a plain-Jane autoloader improbably stole the show. On the optics side, the riflescope field was so large that we had to divide it into three purpose-oriented groups. Meanwhile, the across-the-board quality of the binoculars made for an extremely competitive field. Read and watch the full results here.
