Either AI or the brainrot from SH have entered the chat…
AI doesn't write as well as I do. Someday, maybe it will, but that day hasn't arrived yet.
You're not the only one who thinks I've got "brainrot" because I choose to hunt deer with an AR-15 A4 in 5.56 NATO, usually with A2 style sights instead of a scope. The line of people who agree with you is a long one.
If I answered "Ah, so you're a hunter, too, eh? What kind of rifle setup do you use?" by saying "My grandad's Savage 1920 in .250-3000 Savage, with a Lyman 48 rear sight," I wouldn't get accused of "brainrot" nearly so often, even though my 5.56 NATO load that I hunt with now (same load I shoot Service Rifle with) has more ft-pounds of energy at 200 to 300 yards than my old 100 grain Nosler Partition .250 Savage load could muster out of my Ruger M77RL Ultralight that I used from 1985 to 2020. I probably wouldn't be accused of "brainriot" if I still used the Marlin 336 in .30-30, fitted with a Lyman 66 aperture sight, that I started hunting the wide open spaces of the wide open west with when I was an 11 year old kid back in 1976. That set-up didn't stop me from filling taga when I was a kid and it wouldn't now.
An opinion is like a bung-hole. Everybody's got one. Mine is that if horses are taken out of the picture, an AR-15 in boring old 5.56 NATO, with proper modern ammunition, makes for a better "thirty-thirty" than the real thing does. Because of how I hunt, what I need in a rilfe is something more akin to a bird gun; something that I can pop to my shoulder and get off a well-placed shot with RIGHT NOW. A Marlin 336 with a Lyman 66 receiver sight is that kind of rifle. A Ruger M77RL Ultralight with a 2-7X Vari-X2c on it is that kind kind of rifle. But, for me, the best of three is an AR-15 A4 with A2 sights.
I'm not seeing a hell of a lot of "brainrot" in carrying a rifle set up for the average shot I'm going to take, which for me, as a still-hunter, is a shot that is going to be made between 7:30 and 10:30 AM, is going to be made on an animal that is bedded or just getting up out of bed, and at an average distance of 35 yards.
What my shot never will be is over 300. Because I shoot CMP Service Rifle matches, which have a 600 yard slow-fire prone component, and because the shooting I do is centered around practicing for those matches, which includes practice at 600 yards, I know what wind does to bullets at that distance. If I gauge that incorrectly on the firing line at a rifle range, the only thing that gets wounded is my score and my pride. I can't control the wind, but I can control how far I am willing to pull the trigger on game animals.
I'm motivated to put the effort in at the "front end," before the trigger gets pulled on game, precisely because of the effort I expended in helping my dad and my uncles recover downed game. My dad had no shame in pulling the trigger on mule deer as far off as 675 yards away. Finding those deer after he shot them was always a far bigger pain in the ass than finding my own that I shot in its bed from 30 to 40 yards was. All but one of my uncles were almost as bad, routinely shoot game at over 400 yards. My one uncle who didn't do that was a still-hunter who used a Winchester 94 with stock open sights in .30-30. His deer season usually ended on opening day with a filled tag. He carried a rifle for the shot he was likely to make, rather than the shot he wasn't going to take.
I'm not seeing "brainrot" in seeking to get up close and personal with the game I shoot, or in using a rifle, sight system, and cartridge biased toward the shot I'm most likely to have rather than one I'll refuse to take, but I do see some psychological projection in using that kind of "brainrot" language in response to contrarian views.