Then, Hornady copied it, called it something else, and spent tens of millions of $ promoting their cartridge.. giving away rifles and ammunition to nearly any influencer in the industry.
So, the 6.5 Creedmoor is a copy of the 6.5X47 Lapua, and it's all a bit of design theft? I've seen many objections to the Creedmoor's existence and success, but never this. Well, maybe Lapua 'copied' the 6.5PPC (now in modified form the Grendel) and 6.5BR. If anybody copied or 'stole' anything from anybody else, you could just about say Hornady 'copied' the 260 Rem as they're very similar size and case capacity designs, but Hornady did the job properly with a slightly shorter case, 30-degree shoulders and factory match loadings.
Lapua designed its 6.5X47mm to do one job - to become the dominant 300 Metre ISSF competition cartridge replacing the 6mm BR Norma. It failed utterly in that role - 6BR still dominates. (Whilst 300M competition is a minority interest here, it is huge in northern Europe and Scandinavia with its star shooters public personalities, heavy corporate sponsorship, featuring in large scale advertising and suchlike. Lapua
really wanted its name on the ISSF cartridge the winning stars used instead of that of its Scandi rival, quite understandable and a legitimate result of free market completion.)
Most ventures such as this which fail sink without trace, but the 6.5X47L was lucky in that it was found to perform so well in other roles being a more than competent mid to long-range competition and military sniper performer (in comparison to 308 Win in the latter role which was the norm at the time). A few European special forces units adopted it as did the US custom tactical / PRS rifle builders. It was seen as the cartridge to watch in mid-range BR for a while and every second British F-Class clubman/woman shot 6.5X47L for some years. Most of that hasn't lasted and it's a marginal number these days in top-level competition and I suspect a non-player in the police / military role now. The primary reason is that nobody other than Lapua has ever adopted it, and until Peterson started making brass recently, only Lapua supplied that either.
You could say in the case of the 'those insular ex-colonials' on the other side of the Atlantic that it was a simple case of NIH (not invented here) damnation. But if so, why no European manufacturers, rifle or ammunition, adoption either? I spent a lot of time online when I wrote my
Target Shooter (free online) magazine series on the 6.5s and I could only find three factory listed models with the cartridge as a chambering option - a Sabatti varmint/ tactical pair; the also Italian Victrix match and tactical rifles (Victrix is now a police and military specialist supplier part of the Beretta group) and a Blaser swap-barrel available for IIRC the R3 model. That was a few years ago and I suspect that you'd be hard pressed to find anybody at all offering it as an option in the general sale factory rifle business now.
Like it or hate it, the 6.5X47L is like the 6BR a specialist custom rifle and purpose job and always has been. I suspect the reason is that having been designed for 300 metre competition, it is just a bit small-cased. The recent trend is heavily towards ever larger/faster shooting increasingly heavy bullets ever further. That needs larger cases and powder charges. I've seen more examples of over-loaded 6.5X47s by handloaders than any other single design despite its having an incredibly robust case-head that takes punishing pressures repeatedly. A riflesmith friend who builds some of our best and most successful tactical / PRS rifles has moved to the 6.5 Creedmoor for his personal use despite having been an X47 Lapua man for years and also builds far, far more Creedmoor chambered rifles nowadays for others. Again, it is back to the case size and capacity - the larger cartridge not only provides a bit more performance, but the temptation to load it up to proof pressures to obtain needed performance that is far higher than its designers ever intended is less.
