The .30 Carbine is no deer cartridge, but it works fine for pests and predators.

I prefer 150-grain bullets when putting together a deer load for the .300 Savage. On shots inside 100 paces, I cannot honestly say it is more effective on deer than the .30-30, but at longer distances, its higher velocity kicks in and enables it to shorten the blood trail considerably. But the biggest edge in favor of the .300 is its ability to push heavier bullets faster. Nothing that can be squeezed into the .30-30 case will make it as effective on larger game such as black bear, moose, and elk as the .300 Savage loaded with a 180-grain bullet.

.308 Winchester
Back when the U.S. military establishment was searching for a compact .30-caliber cartridge to replace the .30-06, they experimented with the .300 Savage before settling on a slightly modified version of that cartridge. The new round was given the name of 7.62x51mm NATO, and since Winchester had been involved in its development, that company beat its competition to the punch by introducing it to the civilian market as the .308 Winchester. Doing so was a good move, for the .308 Win. went on to become one of the most popular sporting cartridges ever developed.

I have long considered the .308 Win. to be our all-around most useful big-game cartridge for use in short-action rifles, and nothing has happened lately to change my mind. I love the 7mm-08 Remington, and the .358 Winchester is also one of my favorites, but when it comes to doing many things with a single cartridge, the .308 Win. tops all of its offspring in versatility. In addition to being one of our most accurate cartridges, it is not too big for deer, not too little for elk, it shoots flat enough, and its recoil is easily tolerated by almost anyone who is serious about hunting.

Virtually everybody who makes rifles offers the .308 Win. chambering, and everybody who makes ammunition loads it with a bewildering variety of weights and styles of bullets. Any good bullet weighing 150 grains in this cartridge will never be a bad choice for deer, and 165 to 180 grains is a good place to look for moose, elk, and bear bullets. My favorites for hunting pronghorn antelope are the Sierra 125-grain SPT and the Nosler Ballistic Tip of the same weight. My favorite rifle in .308 is a custom switch-barrel job built on the Remington Model Seven action.

.30 Carbine
Least powerful of the short .30s is the .30 Carbine. This one was to those of us during the 1950s and 1960s what the 7.62x39mm Russian would later become to another generation of shooters. And it was that for the same reasons: The guns were affordable, and the ammo was only slightly more expensive than dirt.

I bought my first M1 Carbine through the NRA for around $20, and while it was great fun to shoot, I never did quite figure out what it was good for in civilian life. I knew a couple of older hunters who claimed to have used it quite successfully on whitetails. Even though at the time I was quite wet behind the ears as a deer hunter, I knew the .30 Carbine was no deer cartridge by any stretch of the imagination. The biggest critters I recall shooting with the .30 Carbine were several gray foxes that were foolish enough to mistake my Burnham Brothers mouth call for a cottontail rabbit being torn to pieces.