44 G&A october 2019 |the modern hunter
Why the Legend? The .350 Legend comes to us because of the
increased interest in straight-walled rifle cartridges. Several Mid-
western states have designated hunting zones for limited-power
rifles that have restricted maximum range and reduced report for
pursuing deer near populated areas. These are big improvements
over shotgun- or archery-only areas. The constraints placed on
these rifle cartridges are size limitations, including the cartridge,
which must be at least .35-caliber and have a straight case wall.
These law changes touched off an explosive interest in the .450
Bushmaster with both bolt-action and AR-pattern rifles seeing
a surge in sales. Ammunition consumption for the waning car-
tridge also saw a commensurate increase in interest.
Winchester took note of this and figured they could build a
better mousetrap. Their answer was the .350 Legend, a poten-
tially better solution for those Midwest hunters than the .450
Bushmaster. Why? It costs less, recoils less and is every bit as
effective on whitetail inside 200 yards.
Winchester was smart about designing
the .350 Legend. All it took was pulling .223
Rem. brass off the line after its second draw
(the third draw puts a bottleneck on the
cartridge case), and easily manage one more
draw to swage the lower end of the .350
Legend case to allow for some case taper and
also size the mouth for .35-caliber projectiles.
The low cost of the .350 Legend comes
from the parent case’s economy of scale.
Winchester produces millions of rounds of
5.56 for the military every month, so there
is plenty of low-cost material with which
to start. The .350 Legend bullets are made
on the same machines as Winchester’s 9mm
bullets and share some of the same tooling.
The shared tooling means that there is only a
slight cost associated with building the new
projectiles. Being smart about designing the .350 Legend keeps
consumer ammo costs very low. For example, 145-grain full-
metal-jacket (FMJ) loads sells for about $9 a box. The polymer-
tipped hunting loads sell for between $17 and $20 a box.
Performance-wise, the .350 Legend is almost identical to the
.30-30 Winchester in the muzzle energy category, and it beats
anything the .300 Blackout can generate. Both the Legend and
the .30-30 produce around 1,800 foot-pounds (ft.-lbs.) of energy
at the muzzle with common hunting loads. I think the .350 Leg-
end might have a bit of a terminal edge on the .30-30 Winchester
because of the larger caliber, but my personal experiences are
limited to three whitetail deer taken by the Legend. I was very
satisfied with how the new cartridge performed inside 200 yards.Who was first? In April 2019, Ruger announced its AR-556
MPR. However, CMMG officially launched its Resolute in .350
Legend earlier. Due to a delay in magazine development and pro-
duction, neither brands’ rifles were abun-
dantly available until now. The Resolute is
the subject of this review.
Getting the five- and 10-round detach-
able box magazines to work on the Resolute
was no small feat. Most AR magazines have
ribs that line the magazine interior on either
side. These ribs sit just forward of the case
shoulder and help keep the rounds from
rattling around in the magazine as the rifle
fires. Obviously, the absence of a shoulder
on the .350 Legend required CMMG’s part-
ner to engineer a magazine with no internal
ribs. During my testing and evaluation, I
had zero malfunctions or misfeeds with
CMMG’s proprietary magazines.
CMMG has a reputation for building
high-quality part kits and firearms andthe .350 Legend (center) is a straight-
walled rifle cartridge that uses the .223
remington (left) as its parent case.
Legend brass has the same first two
draw procedures as the .223 rem.,
which explains why ammunition for
this new cartridge is so affordable.
.450 Bushmaster is at above-right.