#RimfireReport

Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Rimfire Report! This ongoing series is all about the rimfire firearm world. Most of us remember shooting a gun for the first time. As I’ve talked about a bunch of times before, mine was the Ruger 10/22 and for a lot of other shooters my age it was their first gun too. One gun I’ve come across recently on Gunbroker might just be the early 1900s equivalent of that - The Hamilton Model 11 otherwise fondly known as the “Boys Rifle.” Simple, rugged, safe, and affordable, the Model 11 was probably the first rifle many boys shot throughout the first half of the 20th century, and today I wanted to take a closer look at this strange collection of tubes to see what it offered the back yard plinkers of the early 1900s.

Confession. I’ve always enjoyed shooting .22s, but I’ve never owned one personally. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my eye on one though. Back in 2020, the Ruger American Rimfire Long-Range Target (LRT) caught my interest. As a long-range shooter who loves bolt action rifles, I knew at first glance that I had to have one. The timing couldn’t be better either as I lived in Wyoming and had prairie dog towns everywhere begging me to decimate the varmint population. Bad news, I could not find a single one of these rifles for sale anywhere at the time. It wasn’t meant to be…