A bolt action is the most accurate action one can have on a rifle, John Plaster (The Ultimate Sniper) says:
In the early 1960s, I pooled money with my boyhood squirrel-hunting companions Joe Remarke and Vic Evaschuk to buy a single-shot bolt-action .22 rifle. Our arrangement was that one of us stalked forward until he had a shot and then turned the rifle over to another. If you missed, it could be an hour before it was your turn again, and any bushy-tail you saw during the interim laughed at your predicament. No unarmed boy likes being the butt of squirrel humor.
Seriously, though, shooting in such disciplined circumstances meant each shot counted and resulted in one squirrel bagged for each shot fired. It was phenomenal shooting.
A year or two later, when we all had part-time jobs, we purchased .22 automatics — Joe got a Ruger, Vic got a Browning, and I a Remington — and our shooting went to hell. We’d lost the mental focus required for one-shot hunting.