I was on another forum where some guy posted that with his new .30-30 Marlin with open sights, he couldn't get more than 75% of his shots, out of 25, on a paper plate at 50 yards shooting off-hand. He wanted to know if it was him or the gun.
I scolded him for not first bench resting the rifle to determine what it's accuracy potential was and that he was wasting ammo shooting a new rifle offhand at a paper plate if he was doing anything other than function testing it.
I told him that if he couldn't do better than 75% of his offhand shots on a paper plate at 50 yards, then he had no business taking that rifle into the woods to try and kill a deer with it.
I reasoned that a paper plate is about the same size as the vitals of a deer. If you can't get 100% of your shots in that area at 50 yards, or even 100 yards, then you are likely going to just wound an animal and cause suffering.
I grew up with the acceptable standard of a hunting rifle being 1.5 MOA at 100 yards using a rest. All of my hunting rifles will do 1 MOA or better. I come from a family of marksmen, so maybe my standards are too high.
Do you have an accuracy standard for hunting rifles? What is it?