ORIGINAL: Chris_H

Unless you're planning on making head/neck shots on deer, I'm not sure if I would use a .223. Here's my reasoning:

When I was 12, I had a doe come out in front of my stand at about 50 yards.I was setupright beside a ditch that was about 8 foot deep. All of the dirt was piled up into a hill beside the ditch, so one side was actually about 12 feet deep, if you get what I'm saying. The stand was on top of the hill, so I was about 20 foot up in the air. I had a .223, using 75 grain FMJ. I put the cross hairs on her vitals, squeezed the trigger, and she dropped. She kicked and thrashed on top of the hill for about a minute until she slid into the ditch, just out of my sight. I waited for a good hour before I got out of the stand. I walked over to where she dropped into the ditch, and she was GONE. I looked all over for blood, but didn't find a damned thing. I looked until it got dark, and my dad came walking up to my stand to come get me. I told him what happened, so we continued to look. We together searched for any trace of the deer. Making circles, walking up and down the ditch, everything you could think of. It had been about two hours, and nothing. We called my sisters boyfriend to come help us out. He rolled up there at about 9pm, and we covered every inch of ground within 500 yards of where I shot that deer. At 2am we called it quits; we never found the deer. It was tragic for me, because I was so excited that I thought I had finally got my first deer, and because the deer was wounded and roaming around the woods with a bullet in her... she probably fell prey to a bobcat or something...