KJOHN and STENCOLLECTOR have hit the nail right on the head: most of the UNregistered are UNregistered for a reason. Everything of mine is Registered because I was already caught in the trap, being a pistol owner. THEN the restrictions came: cutoff on FAs, ban on .25s, ban on .32s, registration of CAs, creation of Prohib class rifles, Prohibbing of half of my handguns et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitam, ad nauseam. It was pure Fabianism at its most insidious.... and it was ALL aimed at the people who don't commit violent crimes, while the violent criminals were being coddled by a Lib/Socialist mentality which holds that C-store robbers and serial rapists and FLQ terrorists are actually nice, misunderstood people. It became socially-accepted to steal a billion, just so long as you didn't bother one of the Chartered Banks.... and self-defence became a serious no-no because it would take case-load away from that horde of social workers/therapists/counsellors/victim-aid workers and so forth who were thriving on the dung-heap of violent crme without having to get their hands dirty.
So when the Gummint said "Thou Shalt Register Everything or Go to Jail for the Next Ten Years of Thy Life".... I complied. I registered everything, including an entire rack of absolute junk which used to be SMLEs before they were stripped for parts. I used the real serial numbers, of course, being aware that one of my neighbours had registered his heat gun (he ended up in court) and another had registered his electric drill (he went to jail) but they never did get the guy with the "Torped" rifle (he just used what was on the rifle, exactly as they told him to!). So I have an entire HOARD of dead SMLEs and only need $10,000 worth of parts to restore them into $4000 worth of rifles. It was either that or let them go to the smelter.... and I would NOT allow that. The parts, of course, are available cheap in the USA but cannot be sent to Canada; the way to bring them in is to have them sent to ICELAND first, then your buddy in Reykjavik sends them to you. The postage is ferocious but the Governments love it because THEY get YOUR money.
And the Registry was just so VERY efficient. They told me to put down on the forms what was on the rifles..... and then they took better than FOUR YEARS to work out that "Imperatorski Sestroryetski Oruzheiniya Zavod" translated (in their little book) into "Mosin" and that a "3-line 1908-type" cartridge was now officially a "7.62mm" but they didn't specify which one. Unfired, numberless Long Branch Number 4 rifles, they told me, are so very common that they had to have a little computer sticker attached in order to differentiate them from my .25RF Cooey Canuck..... which had its sticker in the same envelope as all the others..... and no way to tell which was which.... and 10 years in the slammer if YOU get it wrong.
Once it is finally GONE, things might free up a BIT, but I don't think there will be any MILSURP MILLENNIUM for us. The high-ticket items of today are the RESIDUE of all those Milsurps brought in from the 1950s through to the 1980s, the leftovers after Bubba got that crate of unfired 1935 Mausers and slicked them all up into shorty-sporty deer rifles with his hacksaw and side-grinder and drill-press, what was left over after he attacked the Kar-43 with his chainsaw and made it "practical".
The SVTs and Moisin-Nagants and the SKSs coming out of the former Soviet Onion today are the LAST of the great National Arsenals which will empty onto the milsurp market. Everything after the SKS is PROHIBITED and will remain that way until the entire dreckload of C-68 is HISTORY. Then we MIGHT get a chance.
So what else is there? Russia has 100,000 Maxims, but we can't have those in a Free Country. Russia has millions of Klacks, but we can't have those in a Free Country. Czechoslovakia kept the Kar-43 in production for more than 2 years AFTER WW2. They sold off the ones with Nazi markings in the 1960s but none of the Czech-marked ones have hit the market.... yet. They had at least two factories for the MG-34; semi-auto receivers at a FAIR price would dispose of a bunch of those. I would take a semi-auto Maxim at a FAIR price rather than one artificially hyped higher every day by hysteria and Chicken Little; it would be interesting to see just how accurate one could be made.
But let's look at particulars. A Kar-43 today is a $3600 toy. Lever had them, a whole rack, at $60. A Canadian dollar was .6 of an ounce of Silver and the minimum wage was HALF of a Canadian dollar per hour. So you worked your buns off and got .3 of an ounce of silver for your hour, so that Kar-43 represented 120 hours of work OR 36 Troy ounces of Silver. Silver today is close to $40 a Troy ounce, so that Kar-43 was worth 36 ounces of Silver back then or about 100 ounces of Silver today...... or almost 2 ounces of $32 Gold (which now is over $1700 an Ounce). You have earned value, but not as much as you think, measured in constants, although certainly better than 3% Canada Bonds where you pay back a third in taxes and the remaining 2% that you "make" depreciates at 6% per annum...... along with your capital.
PRICES are changing, but that's illusive. Prices are changing rapidly because the DOLLAR is DROPPING. Your investment in Milsurps is an INVESTMENT in STABILITY more than it is anything else. An Ounce of Silver or Gold today buys much the same, in terms of the necessities of life, as it did when Tiberius was wearing his nice, new crown and Yeshua ben Joseph was working as a stonemason and thinking about becoming a preacher.
But I doubt that there will be any new huge shipments of $27.50-apiece-unfired-in-grease Kar-98ks in our future. But there WILL be STABILITY..... and that's a lot more than you can say for paper (now plastic) money.
But there is always hope...... I wonder where all those Chinese .43-calibre Lee rifles went to...... I wonder where all those Colt-made Berdan-1 rifles ended up...... warehouse somewhere, one can hope, along with the Romanian 1913 Steyrs, the Russian Lugers, the rest of the Viet Cong "Enfield" revolvers and all the other super-rarities that we read about only. We can hope, always.
Just my slant on things.
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