Savage Precision Carbine

I confess: grim people peering at me through opaque glasses don't sell me many rifles. They must, however, have a following. In full tactical gear, they show up in shooting rags with the regularity of soap celebrities in The National Enquirer.

Granted, black rifles with magazines as long as fish billies would be ill-placed in the hands of stump-sitting curmudgeons in red plaid. Still, I pine for the days when you didn't need a handbook of military acronyms read rifle descriptions, when menace wasn't a sales tool and people holding guns were mostly people you wanted to know and who wanted to know you. In those days, artists like Bob Kuhn brought the field to the page, and shooting wizards like Tom Frye entertained with guns that any shooter could buy--without access to a trust fund or a mid-level security clearance.

"Get over it," says my long-suffering wife Alice, who must occasionally photograph me wielding a rifle she wouldn't buy if it showed up in an Avon catalog with a $50 gift certificate. "If rifles sell, that's good." She's right. Besides, rifles aren't weapons unless you use them as such--no matter the verbiage of the grim. Even rifles in the LE category (that's law enforcement; I looked it up) can be fine sporting rifles. You can kill big game with them and have fun with them on steel targets. They can help you shoot better.

Take the Savage Model 10 Precision Carbine. At its heart is a sturdy short-action mechanism whose forebear appeared 50 years ago. Nicholas A. Brewer designed it at his Florida home; he mailed the drawings to Savage at Chicoppee Falls, Massachusetts. The tubular receiver had a separate recoil lug and a barrel nut that made headspacing easy. A short, lug-mounted hook ducked Remington's patent for its bolt-face extractor. Brewer specified an ambidextrous tang safety.

Savage had barely completed tooling when Nicholas Brewer died. The first rifles, in .270 and .30-06, retailed for $109.95. Evidently the price prompted the model number. More than 3 1/2 million Model 110s have since been shipped--testament to the rifle's great reliability, modest price and fine off-the-shelf-accuracy. In 2003 the AccuTrigger offered shooters a clean, lightweight pull without compromising safey.

Savage then whittled at the calf-thick grips of its hardwood stocks to improve handling. It added American Classic and Euro Classic stocks of cut-checkered walnut. Detachable boxes were designed for easy release and to fall right into your hand. Somewhere along the way the safety got a third detent, to unlock the bolt in "safe" mode. Stainless steel and synthetic stocks, a variety of barrel contours and a short action boosted the rifle's versatility. Chamberings grew to nearly 20.