Ruger 10/22LR, 10 shots, semi-auto.
Every kid's first rifle.
I’d give anything to have my first rifle - a single shot .22. I went off to college without it and years later I found that it had been given away.
Sigh.....
Ruger 10/22LR, 10 shots, semi-auto.
Every kid's first rifle.
Glenfield model 60 my Dad bought me was my first non BB gun!
Still a tack driver to this day, roughly 43 years later!
An all around great rifle! Poison to squirrels!!
I still have my Mossberg 144LS .22cal LR, with a Weaver Scope, given to me in 1958 by Dad, bought at Sears for $39.95, to shoot NRA competition at BSA Summer Camp, in Illinois and Wisconsin.
It’s in pristine condition, and Dad, a highly-decorated WWII Battle of The Bulge Vet, used it to shoot groundhog, from his office window, until he passed last year, at 94.
My Dad gave me a single shot .22 as my first rifle. Our land was infested with ground squirrels and I was given the go-ahead on no limit hunting. This is where he re-re-reinforced the basics of gun safety, such as know what’s behind your target. Like our house. I think I was 11.
When Daddy died, my older Brother got his old Remington 513 targetmaster. That is one great .22 rifle. I can recall back in the 1950s, Daddy would tap a nail into a tree then get back around 30 feet and drive it in with that Remington.
I don’t remember his ever missing.
My father gave me a single shot 22 rifle when I was about 8. Wish I had kept it.
I forget the model of the old Marlin tube-fed semi .22 that I had...it had so much use the cocking flange broke and Dad silver-soldered it back together so it could be cocked.
“We put it away and went back to the .22LR I always enjoyed. I can remember him pulling the bullets and weighing the powder. Low and behold, the ammo had been loaded with enough powder for the .308.”
I don’t think you can get that much powder in a 22LR.
The AM Journal strikes again.
My dad hunted and fished all his life. When he came to America after WWII, the first thing he bought for himself was a rifle. He’d missed being allowed to have one. When he passed, all of his guns came to me, since my brother doesn’t want them. My husband was looking over the last batch of them yesterday after I brought them back from a visit to my mother. One was a Sears rifle from 1950. I think that was his first rifle in America. We’ll label them all so that our sons know where they came from. When my husband went deer hunting in the fall of 2018, he took my dad’s Husqvarna for luck. He bagged a deer in the first hour of opening day with a single shot to the heart. I like to think Dad was watching over him that day.
I got my 2 best old school .22’s for free. A Remington Sure Shot that appears to never miss, and a 1927 breakdown arcade gun that’s a St. John Browning design bottom eject autoloader. I plan on having that one worked over shortly by the local smith. Have a 1907 Winchester pump action back at the parents.
I’ve got a few other .22s including a way trick Olympic 10-22 and a 1922 High Standard pistol in .22 short, the only other guns that are as fun and cheap to shoot are my air rifles.
Remington model 33
My grandfathers with a little tube scope
Still have it
My favorite gun is an early 40’s Winchester Model 67 single shot .22 that my grandfather bought to teach his daughters how to shoot. I bought a years ago from my aunt. With the peep sight and 27” barrel, it’s crazy accurate. When we have family outings, this is the rifle that everyone wants to shoot.
Dad handed down his only firearms to me a few years before he passed away, one of which is a Wards Western Field Model 93m-390a single-shot bolt-action 22LR rifle, which his Dad gave him around 1940.
I learned how to safely handle “real” rifles (already had a BB gun) with that .22 as a boy, and it was a tack driver. The bolt handle is too fragile now to shoot, so it sits in my safe.
Sometimes I take it out and recall our trips into the field to kill Nazi beer can soldiers or paper targets.
Ah, nostalgia! My first long gun was an Iver Johnson single barrel 410 (now long gone) my father gave me when I was about eight. My brother was collared and scolded by a priest for shooting squirrels in a graveyard with his bolt-action Remington .22, but allowed to keep the squirrel he had shot. My brother and I found a 45-70 trapdoor Springfield with a ramrod bayonet and an Allen & Thurber .36 caliber pepper-box in the attic. We made caps from match tips and powder from the formula we found in the 11ed, Britannica for the pepper-pot, and shot it (I think we used 000 buck). Both firearms now long gone, but I still have the Colt .38 cal, Police Special my mother gave my father as a wedding present in 1922.