The Model 12 was Remington’s first successful pump-action .22 rifle. It featured a compact receiver and a tubular magazine.

I’m certain that most members of my generation have fond memories of the shooting galleries that were an important attraction of almost every amusement park, county fair, and church carnival of our youth. At those emporiums of marksmanship, you bellied up to the counter, handed the hawker a quarter, and received a pump-action .22 rifle containing 10 or 12 rounds of .22 Short ammunition. You then proceeded to pot away at various moving targets in hopes of winning a Kewpie doll for your latest sweetie.

The rifles most commonly used in those shooting galleries were the Winchester Models 1890, 1906, and 62. Designed by John Moses Browning, they proved immensely popular with small-game hunters, trappers, farmers, and plinkers, and by the time production ended in 1958, in excess of two million units had been produced.

Such sale figures did not pass unnoticed by one of Winchester’s biggest competitors. In Ilion, New York, the marketing officials at Remington Firearms Company realized that the shooting public wanted repeaters, and as the lever action market was dominated by Winchester and Marlin, “Big Green” placed its bets on semiautomatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns. The latter type proved especially popular, and a significant number of American shooters began gravitating toward these slide-action, a.k.a. trombone, rifles. When it came to pump-action repeaters, Remington turned to John D. Pedersen, one of the more prolific firearms inventors of the early 20th century.

The Model 12 utilized a push-button safety located at the rear of the trigger guard, a slide-release button positioned in front of the trigger guard, and a distinctive teardrop-shaped ejection port.

Pedersen had already designed a number of semiauto pistols and pump-action shotguns for Remington, all of which were popular with shooters. But despite the popularity of these Pedersen-designed guns, most collectors and engineers will tell you that his designs had a shortcoming—they tended to be overly complicated, albeit no one has ever denied that they worked well. A Remington engineer once confided to me, “Pedersen always used three parts where one would have sufficed.”

The Model 12 Up Close
Pedersen designed a rifle in which the forearm was attached directly to the magazine tube. As the forearm/magazine tube unit was pulled to the rear, an action bar on the end of the tube retracted the firing pin and then pulled the bolt down, retracting a locking shoulder on its front edge from a mortise in the top of the receiver. It then pushed the bolt to the rear, extracting and ejecting the spent cartridge. As the rear of the tube entered the receiver, a carrier lifted the next round from the magazine so the forward-moving bolt could chamber it. As the bolt went into battery, the action bar pushed it up, locking it in place. At the same time the trigger/sear lock and the firing pin were freed so the rifle could be fired. A locked bolt could be released by depressing a button located inside the trigger guard.

Unlike the Winchester pump-action .22s, Pedersen’s rifle was a hammerless design with a safety button located at the rear of the trigger guard, and the rear of the receiver tang was drilled and tapped for mounting an aperture sight. It also differed from the Winchester in that it had a solid-top receiver, and cartridge ejection was via a port on the right side of the receiver. These features not only gave it a slim, streamlined appearance, but they sealed the action against dirt, debris, and moisture far better than the competition’s rifles. The then-new .22 was released on the market in 1909 as the Model 12 Slide Action Repeater.