Hornady .50 BMG 750-Grain A-Max Match

I get it. For most of us, owning a .50 BMG is a novelty meant to impress friends and shoot perhaps once per year at someone’s ranch on the 4th of July. It’s great fun, and should make the month of any red-blooded American kid who gets to pull the trigger. 

But frankly the first few times I shot a .50 at distance for accuracy, I wasn’t impressed, and I quickly returned to my .300 Win. Mag. You know why? The bulk, military-grade FMJ ball ammo I had for the loaner rifle—the kind most everybody shoots because it’s cheap—is absolute shit. It’s exactly like buying a $10,000 Gunwerks rifle package then feeding it 7.62 Wolf. Who does that? Nobody.

So why do the few guys who own legit .50-caliber Barretts often only have shit ammo? Sure price is a factor, but mainly it’s because there haven’t been a whole lot of options available, short of hand loading. And that is why I freaking love the Hornady company of Grand Island, Nebraska. The firm doesn’t worry as much about what might sell immediately and what might not as much as it strives to provide Americans with top-notch ammo regardless of how niche the market may be. And I commend them for it.   

Perhaps Hornady’s own Neil Davies, a former Marine Corps sniper, said it best when I asked him if he had any real-world anecdotes about the company’s premium, .50 BMG A-Max Match load.

“In the Marine Corps Scout / Sniper program the Barrett .50 caliber M107 was referred to as a SASR, or Special Application Scoped Rifle because to achieve sniper-rifle status, a rifle system had to shoot sub-moa groups. The Barrett M107 SASR with traditional military ball ammo was not a sub-moa system. But when we used the Hornady 750-grain A-Max in it, this SASR was converted into a true sniper rifle capable of printing qualifying groups, and would go on to be used with great effect in the Global War on Terrorism by several special operations units.”

Accuracy aside, let’s take a closer look at this eye-popping, engine-crippling, shoulder-fired round that makes any big game hunter who’s versed in .40- and .50-caliber big bore ballistics utter “damn” under his breath.

The Hornady Match .50 BMG load (product No. 8270) features a 750-grain, .510-caliber A-Max bullet that’s fired at 2815 fps, resulting in 13,194-ft.-lbs. energy at the muzzle. Compare this to a 500 Nitro Express—a bona fide elephant stopper—whose .510-caliber bullet produces 5850-ft.-lbs. What’s even more impressive is the 50 BMG’s ballistic coefficient of 1.050. (Historically anything over about .400 is outstanding, .600 was almost unheard of until the 6mm and 7mm ELD-Xs came along.) What such a B.C. means in the real world of physics is that this 50-caliber A-Max retains around 6,700 ft.-lbs of energy at 1,000 yards and over 3,000 ft.-lbs. at 2,000. A 10 mph crosswind at 1,000 yards produces just 34 inches of drift. Now compare that to an excellent .300 Win. Mag. ELD-X load with its 900 ft.-lbs energy at 1,000 yards and 300 ft.-lbs at 2,000 with 72 inches of drift. At 2,000 yards, the 300 Win. Mag. isn’t going through a phonebook.

So that is why the .50 BMG is so valuable in certain situations—but only if it’s accurate enough to actually hit something. And that is why I let the kids shoot the FMJ ball at $4 per round on New Years Eve, and always keep a few boxes of Hornady’s primo stuff in the stash house.

Cost: $85 for a box of 10

Pros: there is no substitute for a .50 BMG; three times more accurate than cheap military ball ammo

Cons: it’s like shooting money, which at times can be fun