What a time to be alive

I Dont Care About You

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Trolling through ####### today and there are real or reproduction American, British, German and Russian sniper rifles currently offered for sale.

That'd make for a nice, if a bit spendy collection, sniper rifles from all the major players in WWII. :cool:
 
The best time was sixty years ago when those rifles were available in quantity, often new in thier transit crates. etc.

Just look up some of the ads from Bannerman's or Ye Olde Scrounger and Century International out of Montreal.

Everything was available then even 20mm Solothurn semi auto guns, with excellent scopes and made in Switzerland for a few different nations.

Finished and fitted like the best custom sporters available at the time.

Machine guns, sub machine guns, you name it and it was available if you had the money.
 
I’d disagree with that. They were just having single income households. If they had a working partner back then they would be rolling in the cash.

Real households don't have partners, they have spouses. Husbands and wives.
If the wife has a low or middle income job, and they pay to have someone else raise their children and have a second car....they may actually be losing money.

There are still some desirable guns around alright.
 
I think the average guy had way less disposable income in 1960.

Prices are relative to income. 60 yrs ago you could buy an unissued MILSURP for $20-$50. My monthly income was $225 and gas was 30 cents a GALLON:eek:. Cash was king and money orders were the instrument. I'm still kicking my a$$ that I didn't mail order a M1903A4 Springfield sniper rifle for $100 back in 1967. Turns out I got one in 2005 for $800, which was a hell of a bargain, relatively speaking.
 
I think the average guy had way less disposable income in 1960.

Nope, everything was pretty much proportional and even back then, cheap as everything considered to be obsolete or beyond its best before date was being sold off for pennies on the dollar, often by unscrupulous BUREAUCRATS/POLITICIANS that would purchase the equipment/firearms/ammunition as scrap or were paid by the government to SCRAP them, then put them on the world market to make enormous profits.

I helped to dine more than one offshore Bureaucrat to first dibs on dispersal contracts.

Remember, right up to the mid fifties you could still see fields of bombers/fighters/armor mothballed because of the massive numbers and they cost more to store than they were worth as scrap.

I remember my grandfather and uncle purchasing serviceable aircraft for less than the full tanks of fuel were worth. The loved these things, because they were sources for implement tires on rims, fuel, oil, spare parts etc and if they were big enough the fuselages made nice small graineries for the seed stock they would hold over. Especially for the Hemp.

That was a different time. Huge factories were no longer producing because of all the surplus on the open market, which came close to destroying the North American economy. Europe was in tatters and deep in debt. They needed the money and in many cases for quite a while after the war was over, distributed the left over rations to their citizenry.

Those were heady times.

There were huge purges of Communists, ###s and it seemed that anyone that was labled perversive to any particular society was expelled or jailed.

Many of them came to Canada to teach in our uppper echelons etc.
 
No, they paid for everything with cash, not credit.
We don't actually have more disposable income, we have huge amounts of debt.

Ummm, they had as much debt back then but the wages were lower and it didn't seem like a lot, compared to now.

I bought my first property, ten acres with a year round creek running through it covered with old growth Ceadar, some of them 15 feet across. $6000. I built a nice house out of 16 inch sqare cut timbers from some of those trees and a bridge across the creek.

I really liked that house, but three years later a fellow came along and offered me $40K, which was enough to pay down my parent's debt so they would be able to set money aside for retirement, with enough left over to purchase a Moto Guzzi Motorcycle so that I could travel. I didn't fit well into society back then and a motorcycle suited my needs.

Many of the trees had to come down as they were plagued by ''core rot"

Back then, you couldn't give Cedar away unless it was cut into shake blocks or split for fence posts. I sold a railroad flat bed car full of fence posts to a store in south west Alberta and a bunch of shake blocks to a small shingle mill in our town at the time, now long gone.

People back then had "overdraft protection" which at the time was similar to a line of credit and wrote checks rather than use credit cards. Slower but not that much different.

Things such as firearms were cheap, until they weren't. Just like everything else, as they became more scarce and desirable prices escalated.

You may be to young to remember "Company Stores" they were very real and they were mostly OK but in some cases the people that ran them were very nasty when it came time to collect on the credit extended to the miners or loggers that I knew.

Those stores carried everything from work clothes to dress clothes, dry goods and canned goods and usually had a big liquor section.

The miners and loggers lived right at the worksite or in small towns or communities built by the companies they worked for.

Many people didn't have vehicles and the only transportation was often a company run bus. The closest towns were often a day's drive away.

Prices at the ''company store'' weren't higher than in town but because many of the customers were uneducated and the credit was very easy, with loan shark type interest rates it didn't take very long before the workers couldn't make enough money to leave, because the store had a deal with the company to pay off the credit line before paying the workers.

Things were different back then, but poor decisions were just as normal then as they are today.
 
Both my grandfathers, fishermen in NL, worked in debt to the local merchant for supplies and staples.
Never saw cash.
And many a miner owed his soul to the "Company Store".

 
Prices are relative to income. 60 yrs ago you could buy an unissued MILSURP for $20-$50. My monthly income was $225 and gas was 30 cents a GALLON:eek:. Cash was king and money orders were the instrument. I'm still kicking my a$$ that I didn't mail order a M1903A4 Springfield sniper rifle for $100 back in 1967. Turns out I got one in 2005 for $800, which was a hell of a bargain, relatively speaking.

Funny how it all works out, you actually saved money :p

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I will just throw in that "back in the day" (pre-"classification" and pre FAC) the types, conditions and selection available was huge compared to today.
 
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