Category: Good News for a change!
Ben McIntyre, 71, had guided hunters in the Adirondacks for 50 years. He could read a track in leaf litter and call a buck with a birch bark tube.
In the fall of 1927, his eyesight was failing from cataracts. His son, Will, 28, took him out for one last hunt. Will did the walking. Ben did the listening. They sat on a ridge all morning. Ben could not see the deer Will pointed to. He could hear it move.
Will whispered, “Take the shot, Pa.”
Ben raised his old .32 Special, held it a long time, then lowered it. He said, “I don’t need to kill it to know it’s there.”
They sat until dusk. Ben told stories about hunts from the 1880s, about a time he got lost for three days and lived on partridge berries. On the hike out, Ben stumbled. Will carried his rifle.
Ben died that winter in his sleep. Will never hunted that ridge again. He told his own son, “Your grandpa taught me that the best part of hunting is coming home with the same number of shells you left with.” Will kept Ben’s birch bark call on his mantel. It cracked with age, but he never threw it away.
Gee and you were expecting some bad news about California Huh? Grumpy
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Huh!!!
Most of us have shot a classic .22 plinker but moved on to “bigger” and “better.” However — sometimes — simple pleasures are the best!
Early into my shooting career, some of my absolute favorite moments resulted from cool, calm days where I had all of the time in the world to sling .22 rounds at dime-sized targets — and with little concern about ammo cost or being battered by the forces of recoil!
As I investigated what else the rimfire world had in store for me, I would repeatedly come across articles referencing some of the kings of the category: the Winchester 52 and the Remington 37, for example. Many of these designs were once considered the gold standard of accuracy within 100 yards and my interest was firmly piqued.
Unfortunately, my dreams of owning these legends dissipated once I picked them up. Today, I’m a lot more excited by those rifles that, to me, represent a golden mean between raw accuracy and ease of use. Indulge me and I’ll tell you what I think makes for a perfect “offhand plinker.”
The Walther KKJ is an exceptionally well-made “sporter” rimfire rifle. If you can see it with the naked eye, you’ll hit it with this.
“Seeable” reactive targets don’t much care for minor point-of-impact shifts. A rifle with a pencil barrel can zap them, hot or cold.
Two Ends Of The Spectrum
On one hand, we’ve always been awash with lightweight, affordable rifles and many of them have been of extraordinarily high quality. I learned recently that Ruger has produced more than 5 million of its famous 10/22 rifles. I would reason that within a half-hour drive of your current location, you can find a gun store with a 10/22, new or used, currently sitting on the shelf.
It’s no mystery why the rifles are beloved. The 10/22 is easily shouldered and aimed. It is robust and reliable, and tolerant of a wide variety of ammunition. When I was in my late teens, I had fired a gun before. However, the groups I coaxed out of a 10/22 got me to think about shooting differently. “Maybe I have some talent for this,” I told myself.
Additionally, America’s used gun market is awash with a number of .22LR rifles intended as either entry-level tools for pest control or “boy’s” or “youth” rifles that would serve as a child’s first introduction to marksmanship without mom or dad having to break the bank. The Winchester 67, Remington 514, and Stevens 15 are all prototypical examples of the type. In general, they are light, easily operated and despite their humble origins and no-frills materials, they tend to shoot surprisingly well!
Still, spend some time with them and their limitations come into focus. Most have very simple folded metal or “buckhorn” sights, thin barrels prone to heating up quickly and stiff triggers. Budget price points often necessitated budget materials so expect beechwood or plastic stocks, along with stamped steel construction of various small parts.
The Winchester 69 has Clayton’s vote for offering
buyers the most usable accuracy for the least spend.
The Bergara BMR — Its light weight makes for a rifle that can still be comfortably shot offhand even with a mounted scope.
Winchester 63 with a period-correct Weaver low-magnification scope. Light and simple is often best!
Winchester’s vaunted Model 52 is of the perennial kings of rimfire accuracy and craftsmanship, it’s also a boat anchor!
The Other End
As one moves from “budget” to “premium” in the rimfire rifle category, the upgrades are obvious. At the upper tier of the quality spectrum, buyers can expect to find longer, thicker barrels that aid accuracy. A 26″ tent-pole of a barrel not only offers more runway for the powder of a rimfire cartridge to fully and completely burn, but it gives open sight users more distance to ensure perfect alignment between the front and rear units.
The barrel thickness also ensures it heats and cools in a more uniform manner, which reduces any temperature-based point of impact shifts.
Along with those long, gorgeous barrels and hand-fit actions, you’ll also usually find very generous and beautiful walnut furniture, often with metal fixtures for the buttstock, sling attachments and other accoutrements. One look at these guns and you’ll immediately be transported back to an era where no cost was spared to provide the rimfire shooter with the best accuracy the day’s engineering and experience could allow.
The trade-offs, however, are size and weight. Most of the .22s you’ll find in rimfire competitions tend to be big. Extra mass provides more stability and precision, but makes it a rifle much harder to heft and shoot offhand. It’s not to say one can’t do so but those interested in the attempt normally have specialized shooting jackets dedicated to such a purpose.
The same goes for adding one of the most common and historic tools for improving one’s group: the scope. As my military buddies like to say, “Ounces make pounds.” Where rimfire rifles are concerned, I’ve found a 24-oz. scope moves offhand shooting on a big, wood-stocked rifle from the realm of “challenging” to “impromptu strength training.” Show me a guy who can heft a scoped Winchester 52D and shoot a great group offhand, and I’ll show you a guy who looks like Hulk Hogan.
Above, the Ruger 10/22 is well-represented in America’s gun stores, and for good reason.
The Middle Path
For the rest of us, many of the design specs and equipment choices maximizing mechanical precision come at the expense of practical accuracy. In simpler terms: Bring the scope to eye level, and your arms will almost instantly begin to feel like wet noodles and the reticle will wobble all over the place. To quote the old infomercials: There has to be a better way!
Indeed, there is no shortage of rimfire rifles which got an extra degree of TLC from the maker over the budget model yet weren’t fully optimized for bench work. The Winchester 69 remains perhaps my favorite rifle of all time. Yes, the trigger guard is stamped steel and the trigger pull isn’t astoundingly light, but the gun is like a laser in my hands. Within 75 yards, if I can see it, I can hit it. Of course, beyond that I probably can’t see it!
I also have a tremendous affinity for a number of quality pump-action rifles. Often, models like the Remington 12, Winchester 62 and Browning Trombone exhibit very high quality workmanship, are fast into action, and shucking rounds in and out of these platforms is a joy.
Still, I’m not picky. Just about any mag or tube-fed rifle with a thinner barrel, decent wood and a good set of aperture sights has my eye. To this latter point, I find “peep” sights allow for tremendous practical accuracy without the weight of a scope and mounts, yet they also eschew the alignment imprecision that often goes hand-in-hand with buckhorns or folded steel sights.
One key to finding a great offhand plinker is to look for the phrase “sporter.” Through the generations, the term has defined guns designed to be used afield — i.e., picked up and shot. Winchester made its storied 52 in a “sporter” configuration (a gun perpetually on my “one day” list), and Browning still makes its excellent T-bolt rifle as a sporter.
The wood-stocked version of Springfield’s new 2020 Waypoint rimfire rifle also comes with an accuracy guarantee and a stated weight of 6 lbs., 3 oz. Truly, a “best of both worlds” deal.
Elsewhere, composite materials help to keep the weight down. I purchased my Bergara BMR not only because of the Spanish gunmaker’s well-established reputation but because it was light enough for me to heft even with a scope included.
With a user-adjustable trigger — currently set at 2.5 lbs. exactly — and capable of eye-popping groups from the bench, I don’t feel like I’m giving up much to the walnut-stocked, bull-barreled monsters of yore.
Many sporter-weight rimfire rifles feature simple sights often challenging to aging eyes, but (right) the aperture sight is a godsend on a small-caliber rifle, enabling high precision with hardly any additional weight.
Freedom of Choice
Our own Massad Ayoob recently wrote he didn’t like the finger grooves on the third-generation GLOCKs because he didn’t like a gun telling him how he needed to shoot it. The same goes for me with the weight of many .22 rifles — a gun telling me it needs to live on the bench isn’t usually one that’s fun for me to work with.
Sure, the long guns I’ve gravitated to might very well give up some accuracy at the 50-yard line and beyond. I don’t know how many dudes are winning rimfire matches with clapped out “department store” rifle. Regardless, there have been countless golf balls, shotgun shells, playing cards and wood chips obliterated by my ugly, dinged-up .22 and the slight impact shift between a hot and cold barrel doesn’t normally matter on targets I don’t need magnification to see.
Ironically, the older I get, the more time I seem to spend with designs historically positioned as youth rifles. That is, they’re lithe, simple and inexpensive. To me, the feats of marksmanship putting a smile on my face are those coming as a result of me using my own two eyes and hands to zap something just at the threshold of my vision. Almost always, I’m going to reach for a .22 rifle to scratch the itch.
If it’s been some time since you’ve gotten away from the bench rest, or if you’re the kind of shooter who has regarded any sort of .22 as a novelty, here’s your invitation — buy a svelte, light rimfire rifle. It probably won’t cost you very much and I bet you’ll immediately rediscover just how fun offhand shooting can be.
- Friends of Havana blame the U.S., but the Trump administration had to act before China turned the island into a military bastion.
- Declassified intelligence showed that Chinese signals-intelligence collection facilities had been operating in Cuba since at least 2019.
- “China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island, sparking alarm in Washington that it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops and other security and intelligence operations just 100 miles off Florida’s coast.” — The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2023.
- President Donald Trump acted before the Chinese could base missiles in Cuba.
Cuban society, due to a U.S. naval embargo, is close to collapse.
Friends of Havana blame the U.S., but the Trump administration had to act before China turned the island into a military bastion.
America took control of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, after the January 3 raid that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Then the U.S. stopped the flow of Venezuelan oil to the Cuban regime.
At the same time, the Trump administration, by threatening tariffs on oil suppliers, imposed a de facto oil embargo on Havana. The U.S. Navy has deterred vessels from unloading cargo in Cuba.
To get through the American picket line, tankers have been employing deceptive tactics. For instance, the Hong Kong-flagged Sea Horse, carrying gasoil, was falsely broadcasting that it was “not under command” and drifting in the Sargasso Sea for almost three weeks. In reality, the ship spoofed its location and probably unloaded 190,000 barrels in Cuba in the early part of this month.
A delivery from the Sea Horse, according to the Windward site, would be “the first confirmed arrival of a refined products cargo at the island since early January.”
As a result of the American actions, Cuba has almost run out of energy. The Cuban grid has collapsed three times so far this month, throwing the island into darkness.
“Why is the U.S. doing this?” asks Cambridge University’s Jostein Hauge on X, referring to the blockade on Cuba. “For no reason other than its dislike of the Cuban regime. Cuba poses no threat to the U.S.”
Really?
“China uses Cuba as a platform for many of its regional intelligence and security operations,” Joseph Humire, then executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, told this author in 2021.
There is, most prominently, the Lourdes facility just west of Havana near Bejucal, once the Soviet Union’s largest listening station outside its borders. The Chinese are thought to have taken over the facility shortly after the fall of the USSR.
China now has more than just Lourdes. A December 2024 Center for Strategic & International Studies report identifies three more likely Chinese listening posts in Cuba. There is the Soviet-era Calabazar, and a second, Wajay, appears to have been built after the fall of the Soviet Union. There is also a new station, El Salao.
The CSIS report notes that unconfirmed accounts of China’s intelligence presence on the island began with the visit of China’s Defense Minister General Chi Haotian in 1999.
The Chinese may have been operating listening posts in Cuba since 1993, R. Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College told Gatestone at the beginning of last year.
China and Cuba, the Wall Street Journal reported in June 2023, agreed in principle to establish a new listening site on Cuban soil. The Biden administration denied the report, but two days later declassified intelligence showing that Chinese signals-intelligence collection facilities had been operating in Cuba since at least 2019.
Cuba is an ideal location to surveil America. “Sitting less than 100 miles south of Florida, Cuba is well-positioned to keep watch on sensitive communications and activities, including those of the U.S. military,” the CSIS report states. “The southeastern seaboard of the United States brims with military bases, combatant command headquarters, space launch centers, and military testing sites.”
Moreover, Cuba is an ideal location for a Chinese military base. “China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island, sparking alarm in Washington that it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops and other security and intelligence operations just 100 miles off Florida’s coast,” reported the Wall Street Journal in 2023.
China stated that the Wall Street Journal report was “totally mendacious and unfounded,” but it is nonetheless evident that China wants an enhanced facility on Cuba, just as it has established de facto military sites throughout Latin America.
Moreover, President Donald Trump acted before the Chinese could base missiles in Cuba.
So, whatever one thinks of the harsh consequences of the U.S. naval embargo — there is a worsening humanitarian crisis in Cuba now — the Havana regime, by allowing the Chinese to have the run of the island, does pose a threat to the United States.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.