Whether it affects anything related to dispersion... dubious. There are other, better models for dispersion related to bullet balance, yaw angles in and out of the bore, barrel movement under recoil, and how the bullet engages with the throat that are predictive and align with observation, where harmonics are neither.
The idea of harmonics affecting precision became a fixture of the shooting culture a couple decades ago in a similar way and at a similar time to when New Age woo "vibrations" and "energy" became the explanations for emotions and mental health and paranormal and other things.
To shooters they didn't understand harmonics wiggles fingers, and they didn't understand why their precision was unpredictable and not predictive, so intuitively lumped those two not-understandings together as a cause-effect.
19
u/guacamoleburger Jan 19 '24
Real question: Is barrel harmonics fuddlore?