I used to steal guns from my dad. Okay, maybe “steal” is too strong a word--”borrow” is more like it. All I can say is that during squirrel season my old man used to have hunt for his Marlin 39A before he could hunt for bushytails because, more often than not, the rifle was in the closet where I kept my meager gun collection. I coveted that rifle for years until, to his relief, I bought one of my own, and my 39A is a rifle I’ll never part with.

I’m not alone. Lots of hunters and shooters have developed an affinity for one Marlin or another, and odds are it’s a lever action. Yes, the company makes or has made rimfire bolt rifles and semiautos, pump shotguns, a bolt-action goose hunting shotgun (with 36-inch barrel, no less) and even handguns in its earliest days, but its bread and butter is the side-ejecting lever action, a design that dates back to the Model 1889.

Late last year, though, Marlin made the decision to revisit the centerfire bolt-action rifle market with the new XL7. I say revisit because, for those who missed it, Marlin produced a rifle called the MR-7 back in the mid-1990s. You’re forgiven if you don’t remember it since the gun didn’t exactly set the world on fire; it was introduced in 1994-95 and was discontinued in 1998. (Marlin also produced bolt-action centerfire models 322/422 and 455 in the 1950s, but those were built on Sako and FN Mauser actions respectively.)

So why a new bolt action and why now? It’s not as if the U.S. market is starving for bolt rifles, and with the advent of Hornady’s LeverEvolution ammo and hot-shot lever guns such as Marlin’s own XLR, the lever action is a better hunting gun than it’s ever been.

But in the gun business, as in other consumer-product endeavors, survival often depends on diversification, and let’s face it, there’s a reason there are so many bolt actions on the market: They’re far and away the most popular centerfire action for hunting.

“The XL7 opens up market segments and categories we’re not in,” Marlin’s director of marketing, Matt Foster, told me as we popped the top on a couple of beers after a long, hard day of deer hunting in northcentral Kansas.

And one look at the XL7’s suggested retail price tag--$326 for black stock, $356 for camo--tells you exactly what market segment Marlin is aiming for. I know some of you just let loose a little snort of derision. However, if you’re the kind of shooter who judges value based solely on price, in the case of the Marlin you’d be wrong.

The XL7 has been in development for three years, and it’s designed from scratch, sharing no parts with the MR-7. It’s also designed with no apologies to be an entry-level gun.

The molded stock is glass-filled, nylon-reinforced Zytel into which the action is aluminum pillar bedded. The barrel is not free floated but instead rests on a pair of pressure pads at the fore-end tip, situated at five and seven o’clock.

The round receiver is machined from 4140 alloy bar stock and features Winchester Model 70 long-action scope base geometry up top. Initially chambered to .25-06, .270 Winchester and .30-06, it feeds four cartridges from a blind magazine, another cost-saving feature.