Jeff Cooper is best known for his modern pistol technique, but he considered the rifle the queen of personal weapons:
The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.
Cooper codified his personal ideal in the scout rifle — short (less than 1 m), light (less than 3 kg), with a forward scope and ghost ring iron sights, and shooting a .308 from a bolt action.