I like Ruger firearms and the company, but their affinity for adding confusion with their product naming is pretty darned annoying. I see no reason to tag this rifle with the name “American”. Perhaps it’s because names are trademarked and it costs money to use a different name, but I find it annoying.
It's the same barreled action, with a different stock and a new safety. No different than Savage offering the 12 VLP-DBM vs. the 110 Elite Precision vs. 112 Magnum Target and 116 Bear Hunter and 12 Benchrest (which is actually a different action than the others, but shares the same name), or Remington offering a 700 ADL, Sendero, and SPS, or Tikka offering the T3X Lite vs. T3X Tac-A1... Glock has been slightly tweaking the grip frames for their models now for 5 Generations, labeling all of them as Gen 2, 3, 4, & 5...
And frankly, it's more honest than the Howa 1500 vs. the Weatherby Vanguard, which are the same barreled actions with different labeling....
Ruger changed the action on the M77 and called it the M77 MkII. Instead of issuing a MkIII, they changed ONLY the stock and trigger and called it an M77 Hawkeye. Ruger updated the Blackhawk and they dubbed it the New Model Blackhawk. They updated the Vaquero and named it the New Vaquero. Ruger has updated the Standard and have dubbed it Mark II, III, and now IV.
I can say, the Ruger American Gen 2 is a hell of a lot more similar to the original (Gen1) American) than the 2016 F-150 I have to the 1991 F-150 I had, but Ford had the audacity to give them the exact same name...
Ruger just made an update to the American stock and safety, so they call it the American Gen 2 - it's the same action, why wouldn't it just be a Gen2?