Looking to buy youth deer rifle

The Savage Axis combos you can get pretty often are tough to beat for the price as an entry level rifle. Find one in 7-08 and there ya go.

My favorite, but the ammo prices are insane. I switched to a .308 and now am just sitting on what I have in 7-08 for my son when he's older. Hopefully it comes down one day.

My son is a toothpick and started at 7yo. His first rifle was a 7-08 Tikka and i liked it so much I wound up using it when he wasn’t with me. He killed a couple of 180-220 lb Mississippi bucks with little to no tracking involved. He is now a 12 YO toothpick and hunts with me in Missouri. I/we wanted another rifle so I bought a Ruger American .308 and he shoots it just fine. I used reduced recoil fron hornady for his first deer with that rifle and he shot it with ease. Given ammo availability and versatility of the round, I wish my Tikka 7-08 was .308 and he would have grown into it nicely. My daughter is 9 and shoots the savage Axis .243. She’s smacked a couple of does and a spike. She has the .243 youth model purely bc she can handle the rifle better. The savage is not nearly as smooth as the Ruger which isn’t as smooth as the Tikka naturally given the price points. All that being said, If I could go back with what I know now I would have bought my boy the Tikka in .308 and my girl would still have gotten the Savage 243, but man I enjoy shooting that 7-08.

Tikka was bought at Hebert guns in Ascension and Ruger from gun broker. The savage from academy

I had a Benjamin Air Rifle into about 13 years old. Then a Sears Roebuck 410 crack barrel.

Friends had the .20 cal version, the Sheridan. We were aces. It taught us alot.

I would go with a .308. You can get the reduced recoil rounds and it will have very little kick. That's what I did with my daughter. He can upgrade to a better, full size stock when he gets older.

Savage Axis with .308. Get reduced recoil rounds to start.

An AR-15 in 6.5 Grendel is a great rifle and round for deer hunting.

Collapsible stock adjust to him as he grows.

I’d probably go with a decent brand, Mossberg Patriot, Ruger American, Savage Axis II or 110 and probably a 7mm-08. The .308 would handle heavier bullets but it also has 6-8 lbs. more recoil, both are based on the .308 hull as well as the .260 but ammo has been harder to find for the .260.
With more ammo makers using all copper bullets like Barnes TSX, you could use 110-120 grain copper bullets for whitetail and they’d be running 3000-3200 fps. and 145-150 grain at 2800-2940fps. In a good copper bullet, those 2 weight bullets at those velocities will put down anything you can hunt in North America. 7-08 also has a lot of good standard ammo like Ballistic-Tip, Hornady SST, Accubond, Core-Lokt that will do the job.

A caliber that has been fairly easy to find though this entire ammo shortage is the 6.5 creedmoor.

There are plenty of people that do not know how to shoot or pick proper bullets that don’t like the caliber and injure deer. They then run around screaming how the cartridge sucks. That’s fine. They’d do the same with a .308 or a .300wm.
All you have to do is pick a good bullet and put that bullet where it belongs.
Just know that the cartridge is not some miracle round and try to do something outside if it’s capabilities.

7mm-08 was almost impossible to find last year

ETA: it the ballistic equivalent of the .260 and the 6.5x55