Don't Buy a Lever Action Rifle Until You Know This video from Dylan Benett.
Summary:
A man named Tom Riley walked up to my counter on a Friday afternoon, held out his phone, and asked me to pick between two rifles he was going to buy the next morning.
He is sixty three. He had wanted a lever gun since he was a boy, since the first time he watched his uncle carry one into the woods in November. Now he was retired, he had a little money set aside, and there was a gun show at the county fairgrounds on Saturday. He had already talked to a seller there on the phone. Two rifles.
The first was a Winchester Model ninety four in thirty thirty. The seller called it a pre sixty four. Fourteen hundred dollars, firm. The second was a Marlin three thirty six, also thirty thirty. The seller said it had the JM stamp, the one everybody wants. Eleven hundred.
Tom had done his homework. He had sent the photos to his brother in law, who has hunted his whole life, and his brother in law told him both were good deals and to grab whichever one he liked better before somebody else did. The seller told him the same thing, of course. Old Winchester, real JM Marlin, they don't make them like this anymore.
I looked at the photos for maybe thirty seconds. Then I asked Tom one question about each rifle. He did not know the answer. He called the seller right there at my counter, and the seller did not know the answer either.
Tom did not buy either rifle that Saturday. And when you hear what the answers turned out to be, you will understand why that one question is the first thing I ask about every lever gun before I tell anybody what it is worth.
That question is number one on this list. But it only makes sense once you know the nine things that come before it, so we are going to build up to it.
Here is what is coming. Lever guns are hotter right now than they have been in decades, and prices have climbed with them. That means more people are buying them, more people are selling them, and a lot more people are paying collector money for rifles that are not what the seller says they are. Today I am going to give you ten things to know before you hand anybody cash for a lever action rifle. One of them could keep somebody in your family from getting hurt. One of them might mean the old rifle in your closet is not legally a firearm at all. And one of them is a family tree so strange that I did not believe it the first time I read it.
I am Dylan Benett. I run the service bench at a gun shop. I see lever guns after people buy them, and I hear about it when they paid too much. Let us start at number ten.
Number ten. The Henry on the rack is not the Henry from the history books.
Walk into any gun shop and you will see them. Brass receivers that shine like gold, walnut stocks, Made in America or Your Money Back printed right on the box. Henry. A lot of buyers assume Henry is one of the old names, a company that has been building lever guns since the Civil War.
It is not.
