akbound, I agree 100% new blood is good, even if it is a little rediculous sometimes, it gives me an almost plausable excuse to buy a new gun, or barrel! And you are absolutely correct that it provides some great debate material! I would love nothing else than to make it more difficult for Wally World to keep up with the little guy, so I hope you're right about that. I'm sure they would like nothing more than to only have a few cartridges chambered in guns so they could drop their prices on them and run all their competition out of business. Haha, so the gun industry has thrown a curve to the Bentonville giant!

frizzellr, I think the question was asked, only not by the public. It was asked by Winchester and it probably went something like this: "ok, so what can we do to compete with the ultramags that the guys at Remington are bringing out? We certainly can't go bigger, that would mean looking like copycats, so what if we tried to go as small as possible and wring every bit of performance out of a new round, to get it to nip at the heels of its big brothers, the belted magnum" and then an intern with a bright idea piped up and said "shoot we could probably download the older magnums so the new shorties might even pass them on paper". That's probably how the creation of the short-fats occured. Do I think any of this is neccessary? Nope but like akbound, I think it's fun as heck seeing these new cartridges!

I guess the firearm companies needed a different type of baloney to sell what they had!

Gordon