It looks like an inexpensive imitation of Annie Oakley's smooth bore Marlin she used in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

It looks kind of cheap to be honest. I thought all German stuff was supposed to be top shelf.

I wonder if It's legal to have a rifled barrel installed?

Sure.  You can go shotgun > rifle > shotgun anytime you want.  T/C Encores do it all the time.  You can go from .223" to .410" and back again with your AR.

So the barrel riders that shoot balloons from horse back and many trick shooters use corn cob media loads to prevent hitting spectators.  Maybe this was something like that....gallery rifle or quick shot rifle using crushed media loads to break balloons.  My guess....

I believe they (smooth bore .22's) were sort of popular at one point for pest control. I think they were called garden guns. The problem is that .22 shot shells have and erratic pattern and not much power beyond spitting distance.

There was an article about them in the annual Gun Digest a couple years back.

I didn't know for sure. I figured there was some fool law against it. It would probably be cost prohibitive considering the quality of the rest of the gun. Just a thought is all.

I did some research on those a while ago.  They are NOT firearms. They were originally intended for blanks.  They were imported here and sold that way with a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" because they they could chamber live ammo, the same way starter pistols used to be sold in NYC.  As I recall the receiver is pot metal.

22 smooth bores were pretty popular for a while for an indoor shooting game with miniature clay birds.  Remington even made rifles with a substantial back-bore, called a Routledge bore, which gave the shot a LOT of dispersion.

On of the reasons 22 shot cartridges have such a poor reputation is that shooting them through a rifled bore produces a "doughnut-like" pattern.  You can be dead on target and still miss because the shot hits all around the outside of the critter.  Smooth bores pattern much better.

And the link isn't a "garden gun" anyway - see my previous post.

That might have been made for the English market. Quite a few European .22LR rifles were produced as smoothbores to comply with our legal definitions of a shotgun.

The definitions are more restrictive these days with magazine capacity limits (2+1) and no detachable magazines allowed. I think the pre-'88 regulations were basically just a minimum 24" inch, smoothbore barrel. Not 100% sure if the barrel length limit was set at 24" inches by that point.

The most common .22LR, European made lever-actions over here are Erma. Never seen one made by Reck, but I have seen CO2 pistols made by them.



European Garden guns are typically single shot bolt-actions, chambered in 9mm Flobert. There are variations, including semi-automatics. Bernadelli still make their semi-auto version.

That's a seriously hideous rifle, I'm surprised at the $195 price tag hanging from it, seems like a $20 special to me (and then haggle them down).

It's sold, did you buy the gun?

This gun is no more hideous than any number of other German or American guns with receivers made from zinc alloy and finished with black paint, or an SKS, AK-47, or just about any other military surplus firearm.

It's a cheap gun, sold as a cheap gun when new, and now.