For anyone wishing to expand their knowledge about the WalMart "Special" firearms, I offer the following article written by Doctor James Clary, and which may be found at;

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This is not compulsory reading; but offered as a voluntary public service message for anyone who seeks information for their own edification and/or personal use. 

Dr.Maynard

A good read.
A bit off topic, but with so many firearms being purchased through the internet these days, it's most important to support our local dealers, lest they perish and all we're left with is Wally world. My local owner says the markup on new guns is very small. As yang to the yin, he does make $25 on transfers from internet buyers.

Nevermind.....

First off, having degrees in fisheries and zoology does not qualify him as a person that can judge the quality of a firearm by what other people say.  If you think Ruger built rifles of different qualities to sell at different prices, you're dead wrong.  Bill would never allow it.  Yes, some gun companies did make firearms of various values but they were marked differently so the consumer new it.  Many carried trade names even though they were made by Winchester or Stevens.  That was all part of the game to maximize sales to people of various incomes.  In the last 40 yrs or more, big box stores put the small owners out of business because of volume discounts.  When I worked in gun sales, our distributor's catalogs had 4 or 5 tiers of prices.  The more you bought, the lower the price.  You could buy 5 Ruger 77's or a 100 but at different dealer prices.  The quality was always the same. Sadly, many customers would come in to our store to pick the brains of the sales people and then drive over to a big box store and buy the rifle at a lower price than we could buy it from the distributor.