Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Kids at the Campfire Cheaper scopes for the kids 22s

Well I let my 10 year old have his grandpas 552 Remington and his old marlin 81. The scope on the Remington is shot and the marlins foggy. With squirrel season underway he is wanting to upgrade what are some good scopes you all can recommend that are budget friendly. I bought him a cheap one off Amazon and I’m not impressed. Are the cheaper bushels and Simmons still somewhat ok?

Yes, the Simmons is surprisingly bright and clear for the price. Set zero and forget it because turret adjustments are what you'd expect at this price point. It does hold zero.

PM incoming.

I have a Weaver K4 on my 22 mag and no need for anything else. Old El Paso Weaver. I think most people go over board looking for scopes for pretty much anything. 22RF should not take block out an inexpensive scope. You probably have a 22 rifle that ain't gonna win any target match's and if it did it would be pure luck. You don't need a rifle that piles one shot on top of another, don't need a scope that will do it either. You also have a young guy shooting that likely is not a world class shooter and probably doesn't know the difference between an Tasco and a $2500 target scope!

I think most of my 22s have Japanese, Philippine, or Korean scopes of one flavor or another. Most are Tasco and Simmons but there are a smattering of Nikon and store branded scopes. There were a few old Weavers in the mix but they ended up on slug guns for the most part. As I upgraded my hunting rifles, the older scopes made it to the 22s and their take offs from them ended up on guns that went down the road.

The majority of 22s are deserving of decent glass as their accuracy tends to be pretty good. This is especially true as they are often used on smaller targets necessitating wringing out the best accuracy. The problem typically lies in the ammo chosen as most people choose based on price and quantity. With ammo it likes, even an inexpensive 22 rifle is more capable than the person behind the gun.

Older tascos ain’t bad made in Japan

There's a lot of older scopes like that, that work just fine. I'm sure most of us grew up with 22's wearing Tasco, Bushnell, Simmons etc. etc. scopes, and didn't biotch at all. Like DonFischer said above, the kid probably isn't shooting in some world class competitions, and likely would not know the difference between a $2,500 scope and a $100 scope. The Burris FFII 3-9x40 is a great example of a good scope, that I'd trust on most any rifle. Probably anything is going to seem better than a foggy scope the OP has. Good luck to him, it's really not too difficult scoping a 22lr..

Best investment for my grandsons was just to buy them Sweet .22's. They are 11 and 14, with garden variety 10-22's...and are making better than 50% hits on 3 moa steel out to 200 yds. I think it's good to get them comfortable with ballistic drops, parallax, wind dope early in their development. If you can get them calling wind with a rimfire....they will transition to center fire easily. Kids soak up information much earlier and easier than we give them credit for.

Thanks everyone! I have no problem running bushels and Simmons at all on my own plinking 22s. I just didn’t want to spend a ton of money on something, I remember what I did when I was growing up.

The first series of Nikon ProStaff 2-7x32s were sold as shotgun scopes with a 75 yard parallax.

I like the Japanese Weaver RV7 and RV9 rimfire scopes, particularly the RV7 on rimfires with sporter contour barrels because the size of the 2.5-7x28 feels more in sync with the size of most rimfire rifles to me.

They sure do. It's surprising how well some of them shoot too, especially when properly instructed. My long time friend, that I grew up with, brought his son down for a visit a couple months ago. His son was using a Cheap Burris rifle scope that I had sold with a rifle to my buddy about 4 years ago. He was making some impressive hits, even better than my buddy, that was using a newly purchased Arken. The Arken was nice and seemed to dial perfectly though. Glass was good, but I guarantee, his boy (age 14) was not griping one bit about the cheaper Burris.. Where I come from, there's good, good enough, and even overkill. Learn what works good enough, and you are set.

I put a low cost Weaver 3x9 on the kids Marlin semi auto 22. It’s outstandingly accurate.

Budgets vary, but I kind of like the Burris Droptine Rimfire ($129 on Amazon). The Ballistic Plex reticle is nice for lobbing rounds further down range. Seems like a good value to me.

What 24HrCampFireGuy50 said. If you're looking for cheap and good enough for tree squirrel hunting, at around $35 the 4x Simmons will do the job. Most tree squirrel shots will probably be well under 100 yards. I'll bet a lot of us old guys here killed plenty of tree squirrels with head shots using scopes like the old B series Weavers that weren't as good as today's Simmons. I know I did.

The old Simmons 4x shotgun scope works really well on a rimfire. In my area a lot of guys upgrade their centerfire rifle scope and the old centerfire scope goes on the .22