Feelings on the Henry Garden Gun.

My first impression is “some new hire messed up a batch of barrels” but then I recall ...

I have a real fondness for old Winchester gallery guns. You know, pump action .22 short rifles for plinking at the fair or in the back yard. Twenty two short, that’s some obsolete stuff, boys.

I remember being a kid (50+ years ago), my dad using .22 rat shot to take out gophers in the back yard... rifled Winchester pump gun. They had smooth bores back then, I hear.

For a collector, it’s a curiosity.

I’m not a collector, but if I was- I would rather have a little single shot... rolling or falling block .22. ... such simple things but worth many a tree rat or bunny.

I guess this thing is for people that collect Henry rifles.

If I needed to shoot some gophers at 25 feet, I’d use my air gun. If I didn’t have to worry about discharging a firearm inside city limits, I’d use those tiny Aquila CB caps.

Fortunately, I have a dog who destroys the back yard far more efficiently than rodents.
 
Fun toy.
Useful for certain pest control situations.
Possibly a useful trainer for teaching kids / new shooters about shot dispersion and patterning.

I'd buy one if I had a bunch of spare change rolling around. But there are about 150 other firearms that would be in line in front of it.
 
I think most folks would be surprised how effective these might be.

Back many years ago we had a very cold winter here and I was living in an old house with gable louver vents. The local tree rats discovered living in my attic was warmer than in their tree nests. Sounded like living under a bowling alley. No sleeping and haven't even mentioned the damage they would have done.

I killed about 12 of 'em with .22 rat shot from a Ruger pistol from several feet away.
 
There's a limited market for the gun for sure, but for some it has merit. I might end up with one. I grew up, shooting small birds that would sometime get in our chicken houses, and would use a regular .22 rifle with birdshot because the birds were always in the rafters and even a .22 short would put a hole in the sheet iron roof.

But I have another use and that is shooting Carpenter bees. I killed a lot of them with a Ruger single six .22 revolver with birdshot shells, but then as of lately used a .410 handload of #12 shot, and also other homemade loads using a .444 Marlin brass case and turnip seed behind a about 6gr of Unique.

The smooth bore Henry using the crimped .22 shot shells would probably work pretty good on these Carpenter bees. I also have had some luck with Bee Traps, but sometimes I just prefer to go kill some of them myself, and it's also fun to do. I used to have some heavy infestations of them, but have mostly eliminated them in the last year or two, but them keep coming back, (not nearly as many thought) each spring. They love to drill holes in my Cedar posts and frame work, I have even had them do it in treated wood.

So, there are uses for guns like this, however limited it might be.
 
I imagine the only purpose would be for use by elderly people who can't tolerate any recoil and want something to carry around for the sole purpose of ineffective pest control.
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OK Superman, what is your solution for shooting flying pests inside a building without causing damage to the building? A 12 gauge is certainly out of the question for that application.
 
OK Superman, what is your solution for shooting flying pests inside a building without causing damage to the building? A 12 gauge is certainly out of the question for that application.
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Reminds me of a humorous (well, you be the judge of that) story.

I was in a pistol league and we shot at a range that charitably "needed some work". We were shooting our rapid fire, center fire pistol course and all of us feeling very "salty" when a bat showed up down range and flitted in and about the targets. I and everybody else on the line had the same thought...There's no bleeping way I could EVER, in a million years, hit that thing.

But that was me and my friends. YMMV.
Good luck.

P.S. The bat, shortly thereafter, left of his own accord and uninjured. Probably was the smell (the gun powder, not us) that caused him/her to leave.
 
The naysayers here have never had the pleasure of enjoying a good carpenter bee or dragonfly shoot to pass time. It is a genuine hoot I tell you, and you don't need a lot of real estate to pull it off. Savage did a run of smoothbores not too long ago and it seems like they sold well. Good on Henry for giving it a go. I hope they succeed. In a day and age where everything is tending to the tacticool, it's refreshing to see a manufacturer take a different path.
 
I think what happen was the final acceptance QC guy on Graveyard fell asleep and a bunch of rifles got past him/her (must be PC) without rifling. Now Henry is trying to figure out what to do with the guns. Buy them now they will be collector items.
 
I don't understand all the criticism. At $300 it's not a ridiculously priced tool. It is a good tool to own. My father purchased and used a revolver with shot rounds for meadow voles that invaded his yard. I used a rifle with shot loads for the same thing, and also used a .38 with plastic bullets.

Sure, I'd buy one just for shooting grasshoppers in the backyard.

It wouldn't surprise me if they ran off a load of a thousand and left it at that. What does it take to make them? Change the stock and use an unrifled barrel. If they do sell off the initial run all they will have to do is set different wood into the machines again and buy another run of unrifled barrel blanks.
 
What? Y'all don't have cats? I've got a couple of cats that are serious about their jobs. They only look lazy when they're lounging around, but underneath that disguise they are born killers.
 
What? Y'all don't have cats? I've got a couple of cats that are serious about their jobs. They only look lazy when they're lounging around, but underneath that disguise they are born killers.
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For every good mouser, there are a dozen torturers and nurturers.
Unless a cat has a good example to learn from, they tend to just be torturers.
If they are a female that has had at least one litter of kittens, but no good hunting role model, there's a high chance of nurturing. (Catching the mouse, or coming across the victim of a torturer, and just licking them ...until the mouse/vole/mole/bird/rat/grasshopper dies or escapes.)
 
A squirrel crawled down the water heater chimney and worked his way up from the basement into our dining room behind the piano, and among four cats, not a single one did anything but look at it. I had to beat it half to death with my grandfather's walking stick.
 
Of course, using a "garden gun", allows you to be highly selective about potential, "pests". But you can't always be on duty like the cats can. On the other hand, I tell my cats that rats, mice and moles are fair game and praise them when they get them, but squirrels and birds are on my protected list and they are to be left alone by the cats. They don't always follow the rules, though.:rolleyes:
 
Seriously, the only time that I have managed to train a cat was if it already wanted to do it. The only way that you can teach a cat to sit is to wait until it is sitting, and pretend that it was following your instructions.

I have never seen a cat kill a squirrel. I watched one pound the living bejeezus out of one once, but that fuzzy tailed rat eventually reached a tree. For the most part, our area here is literally a single canopy for several square miles. A tree rat can take trees, powerlines, etc, and have escape avenues within ten to twenty feet at any second. This is why I think that a shotgun would be helpful. They can be extremely damaging to a house.
 
briandg said:
The only way that you can teach a cat to sit is to wait until it is sitting, and pretend that it was following your instructions.
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I politely beg to differ. We taught our cat to sit before we fed him. We made it part of the feeding ritual. We'd say "Sit", he'd sit and we'd give him his food.

The unintended consequence was that whenever he wanted food, he'd walk up to one of us and sit, then expect to be fed. ;)
 
The naysayers here have never had the pleasure of enjoying a good carpenter bee or dragonfly shoot to pass time. It is a genuine hoot I tell you, and you don't need a lot of real estate to pull it off. Savage did a run of smoothbores not too long ago and it seems like they sold well. Good on Henry for giving it a go. I hope they succeed. In a day and age where everything is tending to the tacticool, it's refreshing to see a manufacturer take a different path.
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I had to look them up and see what all the noise was about. Neat little gun. I would never buy one because I don't have a need for one. But if I needed a gun for that purpose I would just load a light 410 with #12 shot (I have about 18 pounds of it left) or I would find a beater 22 in the pawn shop and smooth out the rifling and make my own smoothbore.

I have mentioned before I grew up working in my dads machine shop. We had an air compressor that had two 300 gallon tanks hooked together because we needed a strong supply of air. The air nozzles my dad owned were the old style with no restricktors in them like new air nozzles have. They would blow up a storm and really knocked chips off of finished parts.

The end of the nozzles were threaded so you could add a 1/4" stinger with a flair nut so you could get down in any recesses and blow them out. My dad had a stack of what he called steel fuel line. This was 1/4" steel tubing in about 10" lengths that was perfectly straight. It didn't take me long to have one of those "barrels" fitted to my air nozzle.

I had a 16oz coffee can full or steel Roto-Blast shot. This stuff is just a little smaller than #12 shot. I made a ram rod and used paper towels for a wad, then a load of shot and anothe wad of towel over the shot.

I would shoot dragon flies out of the back door. Flies out of the air and myself every once in a while if I forgot it was loaded. That sucker hurt too. Steel BBs were a perfect fit and shot as hard as a Daisy Red Rider. I had a LOT of fun with that gizmo and can see where one of the Henry guns would be a hoot to have on hand if you could find a cheap source of 22 shot loads.
 
natman said:
I politely beg to differ. We taught our cat to sit before we fed him. We made it part of the feeding ritual. We'd say "Sit", he'd sit and we'd give him his food.

The unintended consequence was that whenever he wanted food, he'd walk up to one of us and sit, then expect to be fed. ;)
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Safe money says that cat never sat when he wasn't hungry. That isn't so much teaching as it is grudging compliance. If the cat could figure out a way to take the food from your warm corpse his sitting days would be over.
 
OK Superman, what is your solution for shooting flying pests inside a building without causing damage to the building? A 12 gauge is certainly out of the question for that application.
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My father used bird shot in a .44 Magnum for rats that had invaded the old farm house and basement one year when I was younger. Worked fine.

To me its a solution in search of a problem and I wouldn't run out and buy one. I hope they make them, I hope people want them, and I hope they sell them. Its not for me.
 
And then there is the question of whether or not it is legal to discharge a firearm within a particular jurisdiction. Where I live, inside a certain urban-growth-boundary, it is not legal, but an air-rifle is.
 
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