My Phony Greeting Card Holiday Fathers Day gift this year is a Mark IIF rifle from Savage Arms in .22LR caliber. This weapon is, in fact, the first firearm I’ve ever owned. I’m pretty excited, and it joins a tradition of pretty darn cool Fathers Day gifts from my wife and her mother.
Why this rifle as my first firearm?
- It’s cheap to own. MSRP is $214.00. Purchase price at our local gun store was $195.71. That’s a pretty darn inexpensive rifle.
- It’s cheap to shoot. .22LR ammunition is everywhere and it’s dirt cheap. You can buy a box of 50 rounds for less than $5, and if you buy it in bulk you can get it for less than half that.
- This rifle is one of the most inexpensive bolt action rifles around. Although modern semi-automatics are much more accurate than they used to be, they’re still typically not quite as accurate as an equivalent bolt action.
- The new Savage “Accutrigger” is highly regarded (at least as far a stock triggers go).
- The Mark II family of rifles has a reputation as some of the most accurate “out of the box” cheap rifles you can get.
- A good .22 rifle is an excellent “small game” rifle. Rabbits and squirrel are extremely plentiful in this part of the country, and bag limits are very high during hunting season.
- I’m still somewhere between “novice” and “intermediate” as a shooter, and the .22 rifle is a good platform for inexpensively practicing the fundamentals.
- The lack of recoil and noise makes this a great weapon for my wife to practice on as well. In the future, it will also be a good platform for introducing kids to shooting.
Quite a lot going for it, given the price.
Unfortunately, I don’t have it in my hands just yet. Our local dealer is out of stock (they had a run of folks buying it for Fathers Day), but we should have it soon.
