The result is that guys who can shoot and who put their first bullet into an elk's vitals think the .270 is a perfectly adequate elk cartridge; those who can't and don't think it is lousy. They often conclude that nothing less than a .338 Magnum will stop an elk.

Of course, if you put a bullet in the paunch, a .338 Winchester Magnum probably does have a better chance of slowing down an elk than a .270--but you are not supposed to shoot any animal in the paunch in the first place! And even with a .338 a paunch hit can not be relied on to anchor an elk.

Most of these guys who can't shoot don't recover the animals they wound, but some do. It makes me wonder when a guy at a check out station tells me how lousy the .270 (or .308, .30-06, whatever) is at killing elk, and that next year he is going to replace his wimpy .270 with a .300 Magnum. Then I examine his trophy and find a .270 bullet hole in the muscle of the neck that missed the vertebrae, two .270 bullets in the guts, another in the ham, and finally one .300 Magnum bullet in the lungs--put there by his hunting partner. I am no forensic wizard, but I can pretty much figure out what happened. But this guy is going to tell 50 people that the .270 is no good for elk. And I mean that literally, as market research has shown that the typical bum story reaches about 50 people.