I can't agree with this. I've seen 18" groups shot at 1000 yards at Camp Perry that were shot by a teenager. He won the youth competition there and there is plenty of wind there. The cartridge was designed to be effective at 600 yards according to everything I've ever read. And my own experience is that you can shoot pretty effectively at 500 yards with a .223. I have a bolt action rifle that shot this target and this is pretty typical of what it does at 500 yards. Unfortuantely I don't get to shoot many actual targets at that distance because of having to go down the range to put up a target which means shutting things down for everyone else while you drive down the range and back. Plus there's a blind spot where people can't see you and someone may not know your there. So I shoot stuff people have left standing usually. Anyway this rock is about 2" thick. Someone painted spots on it about 5" in diameter. I only shot at one of them. The rifle shot through the rock where I was aiming. The space you see in the target was once another blue spot. I shot it out completely with about 10 rounds. Notice there are no holes around the spot I was shooting at. This is pretty typical of the results I get at that range and it's plenty windy there. It's on top of a strip mined hill and there's nothing to slow down the wind there. There are other bullet holes in the rock but I didn't shoot them. One of the other spots is circled to show what I shot out. The other circle shows where the other spot was. Keep in mind that the spot was pretty easy to hit when I first shot it. But knocking off those last pieces of paint wasn't quite so easy. The last shots had to be put in an area about 1" in size.