On Monday, Smith & Wesson came off the bench that they have been sitting on for 170 years and introduced a lever action rifle. The new Model 1854– so named after the patent the company’s founders filed that year for what became the Volcanic series of lever guns— is a stainless “big loop” rifle that favors the Marlin 1895 Stainless Big Loop by a good bit.
The differences between the two is that the S&W model has a synthetic stock with Magpul M-LOK slots, a removable magazine tube, a shorter optics top rail, and is chambered in .44 Magnum rather than .45-70 like the Marlin.
