For deer hunters who want more punch than the .25-caliber family of cartridges offers, the step step up the scale is the .264-caliber family, or 6.5mm for Europhiles.
There is a lot to like about the 264 family. Bullets are long and sleek for their weight, making them excellent long range projectiles that will cleanly take any size deer at almost any distance in Arkansas. Unfortunately, our selections are very limited and include, in order of modernity, the 6.5 Creedmoor, 260 Remington, 264 Winchester Magnum and 6.5x55 Swedish. Niche applications include the 6.5 PRC, 6.5-300 Weatherby Magnum, 6.5-284 Norma and 26 Nosler.
6.5 Creedmoor
This relatively new cartridge has very quickly become one of the world's most popular cartridges among hunters and competitive shooters. It also arouses profound emotions within the shooting community. Loyalists to other cartridges, especially to the 6.5x55 Swedish, deeply resent the Creedmoor. It's hilarious, really, that people are so passionate over a brass container being better or worse than a different brass container.
The fact is that Hornady designed the 6.5 Creedmoor for the most modern bullets with the highest ballistic coefficients. It is also designed to much tighter tolerances than cartridges like the Swede, which is more than 100 years old.
Bill Pool, owner of Arkansas Gun Traders in Benton, is a gunsmith and a competitive rifleman. He said that Hornady designed the 6.5 Creedmoor with the objective of centering the bullet in the rifling when a cartridge is fired. It achieves that with unusually tight throat tolerances. Centering the bullet in the bore is essential to accuracy.
"Most SAAMI specifications for cartridges have fairly generous tolerances as far as neck diameter and chamber sizes go," Pool said. "All factory ammo is undersize, so it will fit anything. When you fire it, it expands to fit the chamber. The more generous the neck diameter is in chamber, the less likely it is to center that bullet in rifling. Hornady tightened the specs to make sure the neck is a good fit to make sure that bullet starts straight."
Old bullets, like the Winchester Power Point and Remington Core-Lokt, are great hunting bullets, but they are ballistically obsolete compared to newer bullets made by Hornady, Berger, Nosler, Lapua and others for which the 6.5 Creedmoor is designed.
"Today we have really good bullets that are three and four times as good as bullets made 50 years ago in the sense that nearly all bullets lead core with a copper jacket," Pool said. "The only way a bullet is balanced is if the jacket is uniform all the way around. All of that is for nought if a bullet enters the rifling slightly crooked. In a lot of people's minds, they think if a bullet starts crooked, that it straightens up, but it doesn't straighten up. If it goes in crooked, it's swaged that way, and the original center of the bullet is no longer its center in the bore."
Also, with the Creedmoor, the widest part of a bullet rests precisely at the junction of the cartridge neck and shoulder. This prevents gas from escaping unevenly past the bullet in imperfectly-concentric necks. In addition to keeping chamber pressures consistent, it also helps center the pressure on the widest part of the bullet, which also prevents ignition gases from canting a bullet as it enters the rifling.
All of that is a long way of saying that the Creedmoor is a modern, very well designed cartridge that is ideal for Arkansas deer hunting. Its gentle recoil and mild muzzle blast make it very pleasant to shoot and easy to shoot accurately.
Almost every major manufacturer makes a rifle chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor, and ammo in normal times is easy to find.
6.5x55 Swedish
I have extensive experience with this fabled cartridge. From 2008-19, it was my primary deer cartridge packaged in a Ruger Model 77 Mark II.
Ballistically, the Swede is very similar to the Creedmoor, except in a long-action case. Factory ammunition is loaded mild and gives you about 2,500 feet per second muzzle velocity out of a 29-inch barrel. My Ruger had a 22-inch barrel, so I used hot handloads to make up the difference. I got up to about 2,650 fps before I started getting signs of excessive chamber pressure.
Like the Creedmoor, recoil was very mild, even with hot loads, and the Ruger was remarkably accurate with 140-gr. bullets.
Modern rifles in 6.5x55 are rare. Winchester and Ruger made them for a while. To my knowledge, CZ is the only contemporary option, and it's a dandy. If you reload, I highly recommend it. If you only intend to use factory ammo, the Creedmoor is the better option.
264 Winchester Magnum
Winchester intended this to be its big-game cartridge for hunting in western states. It employed a .264-cal. bullet stuffed into a necked-down 300 Winchester Magnum case. It was a fine idea, but the 7mm Remington Magnum was and is better in every metric. The 264 Win. Mag. never got traction in the hunting public, and it doesn't help that manufacturers reduced the power in modern ammo, which drops its performance below that of a 270 Winchester in a barrel shorter than 26 inches.
I had a 264 Win. Mag. for several years, a Remington 700 CDL with a 26-inch barrel. I loaded my own ammo, and it performed the way it was originally conceived. I liked it a lot, but I reached the same conclusion as the market did decades before. I had other things that were better, and thus had to dream up reasons to use my 264 Win. Mag.
But, if you must, I recommend the Remington Model 700 Sendero, if you can find one.
260 Remington
Adopted by Remington in 1996, the 260 Rem., was the first attempt at what became the 6.5 Creedmoor. It essentially duplicated the ballistics of the 6.5x55 Swedish in a short-action, 308 Winchester case necked down to take a .264-cal. bullet. In this fashion, it duplicates the formula of its highly successful brethren, the 308 Win., 7mm-08 Rem., and 243 Win.
As a wildcat cartridge (before Remington commercialized it), the .264-08 was the darling of the competitive shooting world, just as the Creedmoor is now. Although Remington adopted it at a time when there was a void in modern 6.5mm chamberings, Remington did not promote it, and rifles chambered for its new cartridge were scarce.
They are available if you search, but the Creedmoor is at least equal and a whole lot easier to find.