When I started buying guns a bit over a year ago, my focus was on self-defense, based on what I had perceived to be an even more dangerous ramping up of vitriol from the red hat crowd. After buying a few pistols (One to get started, one for my spouse, one for me, another one for me, a great deal on a fourth one for me...), I branched out and bought a Stag Arms AR, marked "multi" instead of ".223" or "5.56." That, of course, meant I was to find a rifle for my spouse, and the gun shop had a promo deal on a Ruger 5.56, so now we have two rifles. And a nice gun safe, and a smaller safe for ammunition, and an assortment of ammo boxes for the ammunition that won't fit in the safe because we don't want to store the ammo in the same safe as the guns, and the, well, you get the picture.
Lo, and behold, I'm finding that I enjoy plinking, except that I can hardly justify plinking using 5.56 ammo at current prices.
Concurrently, the romantic in me thinks about lever guns as serious fun (I can't think of a gun as a toy, of course, but I'm able to get my head around the concept of a "recreational firearm"). And even at today's higher prices, .22LR is relatively cheap at under ten cents a round ("oh, for the glory days of two cents a round," I can hear people saying from here).
The range where I punch the most holes in targets lets me "rent" any of several guns at no additional charge, due to my membership fee (if my wife goes to the range with me twice a month, the membership pays for itself--add in the tiny discount on ammo and accessories, and, well...). I spent a box of fifty rounds to try their Henry lever-action the other day.
After shooting my AR-15, the .22LR made me wonder whether the bullet fired, there was so little recoil. The rifle felt really narrow and thin, again because I'm more familiar with my AR-15.
So, now I'm trying to talk myself out of buying a Henry lever-action .22LR, and finding it easier to talk myself out of buying anything else in lever-action because what's readily available is in calibers that are harder to get than .30-30.
Henry lever-action .22LR
1Eventually I'll figure out this signature thing and decide what I want to put here.