Why I love surplus rifles
I recently acquired a 98k Mauser. I had been leery of buying surplus guns for a long time…afraid that I would end up with an expensive piece of junk. But I decided that the time was ripe to pick one up. If nothing else, I figured I would have an action that I could use for something more tricked out.
What I ended up with was a Russian capture 98k. For those who don’t know what that means, let me ‘splain. At the end of the war, the Soviets captured a whole mess of German rifles. Russians being Russians, they packed them away in cosmoline, waiting for the time that might be needed to arm peasants. Then, at some point in their history, the Soviets signed a disarmament treaty with the US. The treaty specified a certain number of arms needed to be rendered unfit for military service. The Soviets, a pratcial people, promptly disposed of the front sight hoods, cleaning rods, and action locking screws for these rifles, and declared them de-milled. Everyone left happy. The Russians later sold off them off for surplus.
When I got the gun home, I cleaned off the crusted cosmoline and wiped down the stock with Murphy’s oil soap. I looked up the manufacturing codes. It’s not a rare rifle. The bolt serial number doesn’t match the reciever. There is ugly Soviet electric pencil serial numbers scratched on the top of the bolt, where it was force matched at whatever Soviet arsenal it was refinished. My original intent was to strip it down to the action, and have it be a project gun that I could build up and practice my gunsmithing “skills.”
But the more I held it, and worked the action, and thought about the history behind the gun, I decided I just couldn’t do it. My wife is a history teacher…and this gun was a piece of living history. Did some poor German hold it while shivering on the Eastern front after being sent to his death by that madman in Berlin? Or did it sit in some arms room until being captured and maimed by the Russians and dragged back behind the Iron Curtain? And isn’t that maiming part of history, too, and a monument to silly, feel good treaties?
Firearms are history distilled into an object that you can touch and hold and smell. You can look at the rough workmanship on a ’43 Nagant and really see the effects of the war on a country rushing to produce enough arms to defend itself. Or pick up the weight of a Garand and imagine, in your minds eye, what a trooper ready to hit the ramp on D-Day must have felt.
So, my 98k will go into the safe, unmolested, until some day in the future, when I tell my daughter stories of what her great-grandfather did during the war, at Normandy and beyond. And how her British great-grandmother had two houses bombed out from under her. And let her hold my my guns and touch and feel and smell a part of history.
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Do your part!
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