Man finds AK's in "trash" basically

Status
Not open for further replies.
In the early 80s while letting a friend that worked on the back of our small towns only garbage truck go on vacation, I did! About a week after I started, I saw a paper bag with some arrows sticking out
I looked into it &there was some camping gear & a cigar box w/ tape around it. Inside was a Colt Gold Cup totally disasimbled! After about a few hours at home I had a working .45 auto pistol! Checked it out to see if it was used in a crime or stolen. It was clean & I was told it was mine by the city police. Sold it a few years later. It shot fine! Never found out why it was thrown out! :)
 
Last edited:
As I've mentioned before, the eastern bloc was very long on mass production and rugged reliability (with weapons at least) but very short on efficiency and inventory control.

If you get the chance, read C.J. Chivers' The Gun. Tons of great info in there about this stuff. I don't have the book right to hand at the moment, but he cites one of the ex-eastern bloc countries (Bulgaria I think. Maybe it was Romania.) as conducting an inventory during the last decade to try and figure out how much of their military gear was still sitting around and hadn't been stolen and/or sold on the black market. At the time, even with all the losses, they had on hand one hundred AKMs for every single soldier in their army. :scrutiny: :what: Wow.

Hey, look another drop in that huge bucket just turned up missing ... surprise, surprise.
 
Probably operation Быстрое и яростных.

("Fast and furious," according to my translation mangleware.)

Terry, 230RN
 
Well "bistro" is right -- for fast, but I never learned the word for furious so I'll have to take Google's word for that one!
 
he cites one of the ex-eastern bloc countries (Bulgaria I think. Maybe it was Romania.) as conducting an inventory during the last decade to try and figure out how much of their military gear was still sitting around and hadn't been stolen and/or sold on the black market. At the time, even with all the losses, they had on hand one hundred AKMs for every single soldier in their army.

Albania was another country that had an absolute plethora of AK's. (They were planning to have a "people's resistance" in case they were invaded.) After the fall of the communist Hoxha regime, many thousands of these Kalashnikovs -- possibly even hundreds of thousands -- were smuggled into Greece, where they are being used in street crime on a daily basis. Just today, the Greek government introduced legislation that would increase the penalty for the use of a Kalashnikov in a crime to life in prison, as well as upgrading simple possession of such a weapon from a misdemeanor to a felony. (It's unlikely that this legislation will make much of a dent in the phenomenon.)
 
In the early 80s while letting a friend that worked on the back of our small towns only garbage truck go on vacation, I did! About a week after I started, I saw a paper bag with some arrows sticking out
I looked into it &there was some camping gear & a cigar box w/ tape around it. Inside was a Colt Gold Cup totally disasimbled! After about a few hours at home I had a working .45 auto pistol! Checked it out to see if it was used in a crime or stolen. It was clean & I was told it was mine by the city police. Sold it a few years later. It shot fine! Never found out why it was thrown out! :)
This sounds like the result of a divorce, pissed-off wife(affair maybe?),pissed-off girlfriend(again,affair?). I've seen and heard many stories about things thrown out windows or in the garbage because of "dalliances"(sp?).
 
Hey if anyone needs a storage place for a couple hundred crates of Klashnikovs, I know a dude...

;)
 
After my sister died in NYC we hired a waman to sell off most of her belongings that we could not use. She said that at one house where she was hired to do an estate sale she had found a hidden room with several Uzis and lots of other guns that had been stashed there by the person that had died!

Of course the police got all of them. :)
 
Doesn't a crate with 74 AKs weigh just a little more than an empty crate? Perhaps they were REALLY well built crates...


Sent from my iPhone
 
This story is a year old.
Izmash Weapons Production plant was cited by Russian Government for "Careless Handling and Disposal" of excess inventory firearms,

In a case similar to the infamous Norinco shipment of full auto Type 56 rifles to the USA, a few people went to jail, a few people had their hands slapped and that ended the story.
Oh, and soon after America banned ALL Chinese made military type firearms...
 
In the early 80s while letting a friend that worked on the back of our small towns only garbage truck go on vacation, I did! About a week after I started, I saw a paper bag with some arrows sticking out
I looked into it &there was some camping gear & a cigar box w/ tape around it. Inside was a Colt Gold Cup totally disasimbled! After about a few hours at home I had a working .45 auto pistol! Checked it out to see if it was used in a crime or stolen. It was clean & I was told it was mine by the city police. Sold it a few years later. It shot fine! Never found out why it was thrown out! :)

My theory: disassembled gun, had trouble reassembling, and due to embarassment or lack of time never sought help with reassembly.
Forgot the gun in the box, didn't bother looking in box before tossing.
 
Doesn't a crate with 74 AKs weigh just a little more than an empty crate? Perhaps they were REALLY well built crates...

Yeah, but not MUCH more. :)

I've got a LOT of crates in the basement with Russian markings.

Russians over-build things.

(While Germans over-engineer things.)

Or, in another sense, why waste 5 pounds of perfectly good wood, when 25 pounds of wood will do the job 2x as good!

Also- Russia is perhaps unique in that their primary small arms design (Klashnikov) uses plywood, while some of their ammunition crates were built with fine quality hardwood that's been roughly hewn together.

:)
 
If that were me I'd start singing, 'I've got a golden ticket...' then quickly scoop them all up and.............. turn them into the proper authorities, of course. ;)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top