gun Buy-Back...WW2 style!

[Jack Nastyface]

My own sad story...my uncle liberated a ppk and a luger during WWII and quietly kept them stored for many years.  In the twilight of his life, he gave them to another one of my uncles (actually uncle-in-law) who - get this - turned them into the RCMP during one of their unregistered gun amnesty offers.

I still cry just a little bit when I think how those pistols probably ended up on the business end of a cutting torch...

sniff,

Jack Nastyface

[Longdan]

Prolly in some cop's basement now Jack.  Do not cry.

[Greybriar]

Prolly in some cop's basement now Jack.  Do not cry.

LOL

But I'm glad they let the woman sell that WWII weapon.

[Airborne Rifles]

So as I inventory the equipment of the unit I'm replacing here some of the items that I have to account for are weapons captured from dead insurgents or from raids on caches and such.  Apparently these have turned up some interesting finds in this area.  Just yesterday I inventoried a PPSh that looks completely rusted on the outside but was still functional.  My counterpart here told me the most interesting weapon they have found was a .30 cal water-cooled machinegun that they traced back to a Marine unit that lost in on Guadalcanal.  Unfortunately they didn't still have it but they said it was still completely functional and only needed a bag for the water.

[LongBlade]

My counterpart here told me the most interesting weapon they have found was a .30 cal water-cooled machinegun that they traced back to a Marine unit that lost in on Guadalcanal. 

Holy crap. I wonder what stories it could tell.

[Jack Nastyface]

FWIW...as I have posted before in this and other forums, I spent about a month travelling through the NW Pakistan Frontier, mostly in gov't lands (the karakorum highway) but spent some time in the FATA (fed. admin tribal areas).  One town I went to - Darra (now made famous thanks to Medal of Hornor) - was basically a moderately sized gun market.  Among the oddities I saw included:  pen-guns (looks like metal Bic pen, fires a .22), a PPSH, a Martini-Henry, a single shot pistol of unknown origin but likely Victorian date, and crazy bolt-action rifles made to look like AK's or SKS.  The barrels of these homebrew rifles were made - no shite - of tempered and machined re-bar.

Conspicuously absent from most shops at the time were any US made weapons...despite the fact that the US was supporting the Mujahdeen in the fight against the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan.  Didn't even see the "right arm of democracy", so I suppose they were sticking to Soviet / Chinese / East-bloc guns so that captured Soviet ammo could be easily re-used.

[Jarhead0331]

Conspicuously absent from most shops at the time were any US made weapons...despite the fact that the US was supporting the Mujahdeen in the fight against the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan.  Didn't even see the "right arm of democracy", so I suppose they were sticking to Soviet / Chinese / East-bloc guns so that captured Soviet ammo could be easily re-used.

From what I understand, the US acquired Soviet Bloc weaponry from a number of different sources, including the Israelis who captured tons of the stuff from the Arabs and then supplied those weapons to anyone fighting the Russians in Afghanistan...this was done for obvious reasons (ie. so that nothing could be traced back to the West).

[GDS_Starfury]

and it makes ammo supply much easier.