North American Arms Earl

North American Arms Earl

But enough of that. I don’t hold with the assumption that the only reason for a gun’s existence is self-defense. If that were true, we’d have no use for more than half the guns on today’s market. There’s plenty of room in the shooting sports for fun guns, those used for pure recreation. And if you, like I, appreciate the pure pleasure of just plain shooting, NAA has a real winner for you: The Earl.

The Earl is the most imaginative take on the mini-gun concept ever offered. The brainchild of the late Earl Hubbard, an NAA assembly technician, and his son Dustin, The Earl is a  slender, stylish .22  that bears more than a passing resemblance to a shrunk-down 1858-pattern Remington percussion revolver.

VIDEO

Actually, it looks to me more like a half-scale, stretched-out Remington New Model Pocket .31 cartridge conversion, but that’s splitting hairs.

The beauty of The Earl lies not in its historical accuracy, but in the fact that it occurred to the imaginative Mr. Hubbard in the first place how striking the basic NAA .22 revolver would look if you put a faux loading lever, four-inch octagonal barrel and square-butt grips on it.