There's all kinds of beautiful, accurate .22 rifles out there. But they need to have a good night's sleep if they're going to outshoot a $150 Marlin model 795 from Walmart.
To quote John McEnroe, "You can't be serious!!"
I am until.
Where's your evidence?
I guess it would be 15 years competing in rimfire benchrest matches from local matches to National and World Championships. In our local non-sanctioned matches guys would show up with all types of guns and I never saw a Marlin of any type win one. Remington 541s, CZ 452s, Anshcutz 1700 series, Winchester 52s and Cooper 57ms were the ones that shot the best for factory sporters. You can probably guess which one I shot and won with before moving up to sanctioned matches and full custom rifles.
I personally see very little value in bench shooting anyway and it bores the piss outta me. All of my practice these days is for hunting and since 95% of the shots I take while hunting are done offhand or kneeling, that's what I practice. A rifle doesn't need to be capable of winning a bench match to be perfectly satisfactory for that. I do have a couple of Marlin .22's that will consistently group 5 shots in the 1/2 - 3/4" inch range at 50 yards and they work fine for my practice and small game hunting.
