>>770092With larger bullets and good shot placement, a 5.56/.223 is more than capable of putting down thin-skinned medium game like most deer and small to medium hogs.
In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that shot placement is far more critical than sheer caliber size, and a good vital organ hit by a gun that's "too small" will be MUCH more effective than a shot by a "proper" caliber that misses those vital organs.
Accordingly, the "best gun" for any hunter for any game is one they can shoot accurately whose bullets can reliably reach the vital organs of the target animal, hype and fashion be damned.
As for the magnums, unless you're going to be regularly taking shots from over 300 yards away, there's just no need for them. The extra velocity from all that powder being burned not only doesn't help penetration at short range, it actually hinders it. Conventional bullets just can't take going from 2000+mph down to zero in an instant-they splatter and fly apart rather than staying together enough to penetrate deeply. And the faster they are pushed, the worse it gets.
That said, some bonded bullets ARE designed to handle that, but at the cost of both lower-velocity performance and price. At the longer distances most magnums were designed to reach a lot of the bonded bullets won't expand much at all, and not nearly as well as more conventional bullets.
