TL;DR - .388 win mag does not kick offensively hard and does not blast deer into orbit. It is fun to shoot.

This year I started deer hunting with a .338 win mag and as expected, get lots of questions and some "wtf" looks about it. I bought the rifle for hunting out west and hopefully nilgi and eventually Alaska. Did lots of studying and decided I wanted a winchester model 70, found an extreme weather on sale for around $900 and ordered it. Talley lightweight rings and a leupold vx3 2.5-8x36 and I was ready to roll. Off to the range I go.

Lets talk about recoil first. The first question everyone asks is "how hard does it kick?" The internet is inundated with tales of people who prefer their .375 h&h to the .338 win mag because of the latter's fierce recoil. Stories of scope eye and people trying to find reduced loads, scopes being broken off, etc etc. Having shot a lightweight 375 a bunch of times, I knew that at least on paper, a rifle of the same weight shooting lighter bullets couldn't kick any harder. The winchester has a pachmeyrer kick pad and great b&c fiberglass stock. It can't be THAT bad, can it?

So I got my boresighted rifle full of 230gr norma oryx, propped up across the seat of my fourhweeler (the shooting table at 100 isn't very mobile), gritted my teeth for the impending detached retinas and dislocated shoulder and pulled the trigger. My first reaction was "damn that was it?" Moved the scope, sent another one, "this isn't bad at all!"

I ended up shooting several shots just for fun after I had it zeroed. Don't get me wrong, it does buck around a good bit but it is certainly not offensive or painful. From field positions its unnoticeable. A little more than a .300 win mag, nowhere near a .375 h&h. Nowhere near a 12ga slug. Since then I've put several 250gr loads through it and they're no worse.

So now I have a dilemma. I planned to hunt deer with some downloaded (.338 federal or slower) handloads because of the recoil. Well, recoil isn't that bad so let's shoot a doe with this thing and see how messy it gets.

Second question is "was there any meat left?" These are pretty tough bullets made for elk/bear/etc moving at moderate speeds. I think the 230s are around 2700 fps, about the same as heavy .30-06 bullets. .338 win mag is not the same animal as something like a .300 weatherby with lightweight bullets at 3500fps or however fast they are. Those are going to seriously grenade some meat. I figured these wouldn't open up all that much on a deer, and they were definitely going to penetrate well. If anything, I thought it would maybe be a little less effective than traditional deer calibers.

So I shoot a doe at 220 steps, hit it high enough in the shoulder to catch the bottom of the spine and obviously knock it over DRT. I had shot a doe in exactly the same spot last year with a .30-06/ 180gr partition so I had a good comparison. After cleaning it we found that the .30-06 had done significantly more meat damage than the .338. There was little bloodshot meat, small entrance and fair sized exit, and no nuclear grenade like destruction. With the '06 i had to throw out some backstrap. With the big gun, i just had to pick out the bone chunks. Since then I've been using the .338 exclusively just because its really fun to shoot stuff with it.

So in conclusion, dont be scared of a big gun. Learn good form, have a rifle that fits well, research a good load that will not self destruct or pencil hole through, and go have fun. I am nowhere near suggesting that it is ideal, or necessary or better or anything like that. Dont go buy a 338 win mag for your one gun to shoot does out the corn pile behind your house. Its just damn fun to shoot a big arse rifle, and if you like guns you should have one.