With limited funds to dedicate to the fund-consuming pastime of sport shooting, you might very well be wondering if a casing catcher for your sporting rifle really can improve your shooting experience. For instance, a bipod can give you a stable shooting rest, improving your groups at long distances; a red dot sight can diminish your time-to-target acquisition. These both have the potential to notably improve your abilities as a shooter.
But a casing catcher? All it realistically does is capture your spent brass, and some of them don’t particularly do a standup job of it, at that. Can one of these really improve your shooting experience?
In a word, yes; a casing catcher for a sporting rifle can dramatically improve your shooting experience; just not in ways that you might have automatically expected. It may not necessarily help you get on paper faster or shrink your groups – but that is not the only way a shooting accessory can be valuable.
For instance, a casing catcher like a brass trap or a Pic rail mounted brass catcher will stop hot brass from raining down onto your neighbors at the range bench. It’s a courtesy to them, and if your neighbors to the left of you observe the same maxim, it’ll improve your experience as well.
But that is secondary; when you are at the range, you probably want to spend your time shooting, and not doing other pointless things, like picking up brass. Much like a speed loader will save you from the laborious task of manually loading magazine after magazine (unlike to speed-unload them), a brass casing catcher will save you from the equally laborious task of raking up or picking up spent brass.
Which itself is another booster for your experience at the range, in the field, or in competitions. Notwithstanding the fact that it might be a range rule or a local ordinance to pick up your spent shells, we’re in the midst of a fairly pressing national ammo shortage. Manufacturers like Remington, Winchester and Federal literally cannot keep up with demand. Buyers are clearing the shelves as soon as they’re restocked, and they’re backed up by lines and lines of buyers in reserve.
While shortages of primers may confound your handloading initiatives, hanging onto your spent brass gives you at least a small hedge against the inconvenience of the current ammo crisis. Brass can be loaded over and over again, ad infinitum, so long as you can secure powder, primers, bullets and the tools needed for cleaning, resizing, measuring and loading.
Now, with all of that said, some casing catchers are better than others. Mesh bag brass catchers with a wire frame and a zipper at the bottom may look sleek, but they work better in pictures than in real life. These have been known to melt or even catch fire.
The Brass Goat by Magwell Mounts, available online at BrassGoat.com, is constructed of durable, molded ABS resin that quickly attaches to lower receiver magwells without the need for tools. It frees your Picatinny rail mounts, clears your sight picture, won’t jam, and certainly won’t burn or melt. Consider it a better casing catcher – and get one (or several) online at BrassGoat.com.
