Last weekend I was shooting with a few friends at our favorite range and a couple of the guys were unfamiliar with milsurp rifles. I decided to bring out one of my newbie-crowd-pleaser-rifles: Mosin Nagant 91/30 PU replica sniper rifles. They all had a ball blasting a steel plate at 100 yards with it so things were going rather well
.
Well, during a cease-fire, a trio of Russians passed by our shooting bench (big guy had a sweater with "CCCP" on his chest) and I could hear them admiring the Mosin in what I presume was Russian. Now, I'm a pretty peaceful and good-natured man, but something inside me said I really want to shoot that rifle well in front of this guy.
I picked up my rifle and loaded it. That little voice inside me said "That guy's watching. You're gonna shoot from the standing position. You're gonna hit that target with all five shots. And you're gonna shoot fast. And you're not gonna even fumble with the bolt when you cycle the action. Everything's gonna be flawless and perfect. And then you're gonna set the rifle down and act like it was nothing special; like you do it all the time."
Well, I did just that and after I was done, the big guy came over to ask me about the rifle. I handed him the rifle for a closer look and he offered to buy my rifle right then and there!
Well, as Jeff Cooper said, "The Queen is not for sale." There was obvious pride in the Russian guy's eyes as he examined my Mosin, a 1942 Tula. He was quite friendly and told me he was ex-Russian Military so I offered him five rounds. He only accepted one cartridge and put it squarely in the center of the 100 yard target from the standing position. His form looked good as well. I noticed then that the red/white/blue jacket he was wearing over his sweater said "USA" on the back
.
He revealed that he's also in the market for a Russian SKS so I offered him a go with my Saiga 7.62x39 (by chance I brought out a few ComBloc-type guns that day). He politely declined since in a previous life, he had to carry around a Kalashnikov for years. Apparently, he's only interested in the older stuff, like SKS and Mosin Nagant. If I had to guess, I'd say the guy looked like he was in his mid-forties, since his hair was just starting to gray.
Afterwards, I joked with my friends that if the trio of Russians had come by when I was shooting the Saiga, they might have heard me yell out "Wolverines!" after emptying a magazine
. Then I thought about it: I grew up during the Cold War and if world politics had taken the wrong turn, it's not impossible that we could have met under different conditions. As it was, our meeting was just a nice, pleasant encounter by two strangers with an affinity for firearms.
