Savage A22 Takedown (MSRP: $479)
A .22LR rifle should be a part of practically every gun owner’s collection. They’re easy and inexpensive to shoot, and are a great way to introduce people to the shooting sports. A .22LR rifle is also a popular rifle for competition and a tool for taking care of small pests, and when loaded with the correct ammunition, can also be surprisingly effective on large, two-legged predators.
With all these useful functions, having a .22LR rifle nearby makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, a .22LR rifle is, well, a rifle, and that means something that is rifle-sized, which can be difficult to carry discreetly when you head out into the great unknown.
The Savage A22 Takedown solves this problem by disassembling into two pieces for easy transport. With a press of a button and a twist of the wrist, the A22 Takedown splits in two, allowing for much easier storage when you’re on the go. There is space inside inside the buttstock for a spare magazine as well as a small storage space inside the grip. The stock is polymer for durability and has an adjustable comb for a better check weld. On top of the receiver is a short section of Picatinny rail to mount an optic, and the muzzle is threaded for a suppressor or other device.
One of the things I like most about this gun is that the 10-round rotary magazines it uses are easier to load versus similar rifles in this class. This may seem trivial at first, but it’s the sort of them you appreciate after you’ve lived with a gun for a while, and you’ve had to load magazine after magazine at the range. Unloading and loading the magazine into the rifle is also easily done, a task that can sometimes requires three hands and an assistant monkey on other .22LR rifles.
Savage may not be the first name you think of when you think .22LR rifles, but the accuracy is there, as well has features, and the cherry on top is Savage’s Accu-Trigger, which lets you tailor your gun to your liking without have to upgrade it or sent it into a gunsmith.
Sightmark MTS Mini Solar Powered Red Dot Sight (MSRP: 239.97)
A small, easy-to-carry rifle practically call outs for a small, lightweight sighting system, and the Sightmark MTS Mini Solar Red Dot nicely fills that requirement quite nicely. It has a 3-MOA dot reticle powered by a single CR2032 button cell. That reticle also adjusts automatically for brightness, and if that doesn’t quite suit the bill, there is also an option for a manual override if you’re having problems seeing the dot.
There are some other nice touches to the MTS Mini Solar Powered sight. The battery door is hinged so you won’t lose this important piece. The sight ships with a dual-height mount so you can use it on a rifle that requires a lower height mount like we’re using today or on an AR-15 or similar rifles which require a higher optics mount. The sight is IPX67 rated for resistance to water and dust resistance and has caps to protect the lenses when not in use.
Best of all, the MTS is a solar mount. That means that your dot will rely on solar power for illumination when available, extending your battery life significantly, giving you unlimited daylight use and up to 200,000 hours of battery life.
Sightmark XTM-3 Magnifier (MSRP: $299.97)
Low-power variable optics, or LPVOs, are the current hotness in rifle optics right now. There is an obvious appeal of a “do-it-all” optic to this sort of optic, which has both the wide field-of-view of a 1X optic and the power of something with more magnification.
However, there is a downside to this sort of optic, in that no matter how wide the field of view or how true the optic is to 1X, at the end of the day, you’re staring down a tube, and that can limit your ability to make quick transitions from target to target.
A 1X red dot doesn’t have that problem, and it has the advantage of a much larger “eye box” behind the optic, which means you can be a little more forgiving with your head placement with a dot than with an LPVO. However, the obvious issue here is that it is a 1X dot, which really limits its utility at longer ranges.
Which is why a 1X dot with a flip-over 3X magnifier makes a lot of sense. Now you have the wide field of view of 1X red dot, and with the flick of your wrist, a magnified optic, one that is usually lighter than an LPVO.
The downsides? At only 3X, the Sightmark XTM-3 is typical of the limited magnification of this sort optic, but is not much of an issue on this .22LR Savage rifle. The magnifier can be a bit awkward when not in use, but as the XTM-3 is one of the smallest and lightest optics of this sort on the market, that problem is significantly reduced. The XTM-3 also has an easy to use QD mount, allowing to add or remove it from your rifle in a matter of a few seconds.
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