This is my favorite squirrel rifle. It's not my nicest... my Kimber 82 Super America is prettier. But it's the first firearm I bought as an adult, specifically to hunt squirrels based upon an article I'd read maybe 5 years earlier... a Don Lewis article on using target rifles for squirrel hunting in Gun Digest. It was the first really accurate rifle I owned, but not the last. It still looks new and puts them all in one hole at 50 yards... of course, I take care of it.
I bought this rifle for $300 back in 1981 and killed my first squirrel with it that fall. I was a practiced shooter by then, had shot 4-position smallbore competitively in college, and had no problem getting my limit... collecting every squirrel that I saw. In the next several years I killed a load of squirrels, a rabbit that made the mistake of running (so I saw it) and then stopping on the top of a ravine about 40 yards out (yes, head shot rabbits still stink to high heavens to clean), and a bunch of crows. I remember one time standing in the woods near the edge of a field in the late afternoon, using a mouth call to respond to a murder of crows cawing away in the field, and as one would come in and land at the top of a dead oak about 40 yards away, holding on the breast as it faced me and squeezing the trigger to see it fall, frozen dead... I killed a half-dozen crows without moving in a few minutes. I moved to WA from LA in the late 80s, shot smallbore silhouette with it (and won a few matches) for a few years in the late 90s, then let it sit in the gun safe while I used more expensive, but not more accurate rifles. I got it out for a hunting trip to Arkansas after a two decade hiatus, disassembled and cleaned it (the trigger was frozen from dried grease, and the bolt needed some help, too), and then took it with me. Again, I got every squirrel I saw. This is the first with that rifle, in 2022. I had snuck up a creek bottom and over a ridge during a light rain. As I stood under a pine tree to get out of the rain, I heard a squirrel cutting a pine cone nearby. I pulled the rifle to my shoulder and looked up at a pine tree to my left about 30 yards, and this squirrel was sitting almost at the top spitting out pieces of pine cone. A few seconds later it came tumbling down after a shot at the back of the head (on the other side). That's a Leupold Vari-X III 6.5-20x44 AO 1" scope with a target dot reticle. I often hunt at 16X and at that magnification I can see the bullet zoom out and land on the target dot at 50 yards.
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I have over a dozen .22 rifles, and this one and my dad's Browning .22 Auto are the last two I'd ever sell.