The end of Mil-surp?

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Konstantin835

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I was thinking, and it occurred to me that all weapons fielded by militaries around the world are full auto and have been for some time. Does this mean that the milsurps that are around today are the last milsurps that will ever be available for purchase in the civilian market barring some drastic change in the law which allowed civilians to own automatic firearms. When the Mosins, Mausers, SKSs and other currently cheap milsurps are gone will there be anything to take their place? SKSs, Enfields and many other formerly dirt cheap milsurp rifles have drastically went up in price over the years it seems. Will there be any new influx of cheap military surplus rifles into the civilian market or are they going to dry up and be gone for good?
 
Until certain import restrictions were put in place you could get surplus AKs, the receivers had been destroyed, but you can rebuild them. There are currently some rebuilt M16s on the market as well. AKs coming in now don't have barrels.
 
Pistols are mostly semiautomatic, which is good. I wonder, though, what exactly is left across the world.

Full auto milsurp is a problem, as you mentioned. That means that the weapons must be redesigned/rebuilt as semiautomatics with US made parts to comply with 922R.

Sometimes, it works out anyways, as with AK's. More often than not, it's very expensive, or too expensive to do so.
 
I just hope we'll see Rem700 (M24) and Beretta 92FS (M9) that are all beat to crap and sold at a reasonble price.

I doubt it though since they've been around for a while and no luck yet.
The military has gotten good at either repairing/reusing old guns or giving them to our allies around the world.

Whatever was leftover from that has gone in the shredder recently (and sadly).
 
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you can buy tons of brass at auction. the problem is you litterally HAVE to buy it in tons quanity. you would need several large dump trucks to go in and get a lot of it, because it is sold in open top dumpsters, and the dumpsters are not part of the deal. if they would sell it off in 55 gallon drums, then it would be a lot easier for individules to purchase. i would love to own ONE 55 gallon drum of 5.56 and 300 win mag brass. but for me to purchase 13 tons of it would be utterly rediculous!
 
x_wrench said:
you can buy tons of brass at auction. the problem is you litterally HAVE to buy it in tons quanity. you would need several large dump trucks to go in and get a lot of it, because it is sold in open top dumpsters, and the dumpsters are not part of the deal. if they would sell it off in 55 gallon drums, then it would be a lot easier for individules to purchase. i would love to own ONE 55 gallon drum of 5.56 and 300 win mag brass. but for me to purchase 13 tons of it would be utterly rediculous!
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Sounds like a business opportunity :p
 
Yes, it is pretty much the end of mil surp firearms for us peasants, as long as we keep electing statists to the presidency and to Congress. There are currently ATF regulations in place which greatly restrict the importation of parts kits, and the only way to get those removed would be either to get a law passed by Congress and signed by the President, or to get a pro-liberty president elected that would appoint pro-liberty ATF officials, both of which look pretty unlikely. Also, if we keep electing statist turds to office, the administration will block the sale of any US military firearms to manufacturers like the CMP, who would be able to sell them as parts kits or build semi-auto rifles on new receivers.
 
Several years ago, I was looking at ads in Big 5 for $100 Mausers and thought I might like to have one. Y'know, restock and scope it (before I was informed just how big a sin this is), and with 8mm doing pretty much everything a 30-06 will and Mil-surp ammo being available and cheap, I'd have me a pretty good high-desert huntin' rifle.

I could load 'er down for jackalope and stuff 'em full for mastadon--never mind that practically all Mil-surp is corrosive and non-reloadable...

By the time I got down there, K-98 were going for $300 ($200 on sale) and the only $100 Mausers they had were Yugo 24/47's. I bought one and am happy with it. Ammo is around thirty to forty cents a shot.

Fast forward a few years and 24/47's are $300 ($200 on sale), K-98's practically non-existant and the only thing they have for $100 (on sale) are Mosin-Nagants. Granted, there are several boatloads of THEM running around but that number is finite. Sooner or later, you're going to run out of them.

Short answer, Yes, they're dwindling rapidly. Snooze and you'll lose!

If you want to see what's available in the AK line, or FN's or CETME's, wander over to Classic Arms.

ed
 
I just hope we'll see Rem700 (M21)
Click to expand...

The Sniper Rifle the Army uses is the M24 and that is based off of the Remington 700. The M21 is a DMR that the Army uses that is based off of the M14.
 
Hmmm, sounds pretty dismal. I'm a teenager and new shooter so I've never experianced the "good old days" of $100 SKSs. At least my new mosin addiction is still relatively cheap to fuel to the time being...
 
I've never experianced the "good old days" of $100 SKSs.
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They were better than you think. In the mid to late 1990s there was a pawn shop near where I work selling new Chinese SKS's for about $50. For another $50 you could get 500 rounds of Chinese ammo to go with it.

About the same timeframe I bought a Swedish Mauser in very good condition for $65 and a new Hungarian semi-auto AK (SA-85M) for about $270.

That said, only the Mauser was really Mil-Surp. The others were new firearms.
 
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i dont know why full auto ak kits come with the barrel welded shut ? semi- auto and full auto barrels are no different their both chrome lined? only thing that they should remove is the full auto sears.
 
The barrels aren't welded, they are cut into at least three pieces. The only reason for this is the belief that it will make them less attractive to buyers. That's not the case... it just adds cost (someone has to pay for chopping up those barrels) and inconvenience (gotta find another barrel to build it).

Funny part is, this is about the only area where the government has been able to help create jobs, since a number of US firms have started manufacturing barrels for these kits.

And to make the entire thing sillier, the same factories that originally built the guns in Romania or wherever, can still import identical, newly manufactured barrels to those that were chopped up... simply because they have never been part of a military firearm and now meet the "sporting purposes" requirements.

There's no reason to remove the auto sears from the kits. They are useless unless you have the third pin hole in your receiver, and that's a big no no.
 
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Because it used to be, after Clinton banned most AK imports, the work around was to have the receivers destroyed per AFT specs, then the rest of the 'kit' was imported, and built on a Semi US made receiver with compliance parts...

Well, the ATF said that wasn't the 'intent' so they NOW require that the Barrel ALSO be destroyed.
 
Of course various laws and restrictions could be repealed or changed...

We're accustomed to think of the gun law situation as always getting worse, but it isn't carved in stone that things always have to work that way.

The US and the other Western democracies are heading into a crisis, gov't got too big to be sustainable. There is going to be a big bump. Who knows what the political ramifications will be? A part of it could be a rolling back of restrictions in hundreds of areas where gov't works not as our servant but as a busybody.
 
As far as military brass?

Look at your state's local DRMO yards for sales. There is likely to be smaller lots, like the mentioned 55 gallon drum sizes of them. Want to know why they are hard to find? Generally the price of brass melted in to slag is more on the metals market than it is to sell to reloaders. So Folks made off with that brass in a large amount of situations.

Also, think again if you will see military surplus M9's on the market anytime soon.

When was the last time you saw any of those? Or any 1911A1s? Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw any US surplus?

Even the beloved Remington 40 single shot .22's are cut down in to slag these days.

Regulations and all, you know.
 
It will only be the end of milsurps and other auto`s as long as people continue to think this way. We must change the way we think of the Federal Government. Just voting them out will do nothing.

We have always known that Federal gun laws are unconstitutional and they violate the Second Amendment. We must start getting our State legislators to nullify all Federal gun laws. The States or the People are supreme on firearm issues. The Federal Government has no power over regulating firearms. The Feds are not the final arbiters over firearm issues.

And no, the Supremacy Clause, Commerce Clause, and the Necessary and Proper Clause does not give the Federal Government power over the States on gun issues. Federal gun laws are void, and of no effect. Stop believing they are and we can take them back through nullification. If you get your State officials and the people to pass legislation to nullify Fed gun laws, there is nothing the Feds can do about it.

You have the power to do this.
 
We are just cresting the "haydays" of C&R

I've thought about this and while it's true that there will likely not be many more guns eligible for the C&R rolls in the near future, all is not lost.

I think we've just crested the best time in C&R. If you didn't get on the wagon, you still can but are running out of time to buy straight from the distributors at reasonable prices.

If you look around, you can still find $275 SKS, $300 K31, and $80 Mosins... but yes they are running low. Now who knows, the distributors could be artifically driving the market by slowly importing them and keeping the price artifically high. I also believe they sit in port in customs for many months before being released.

But the really good news is that now all of those millions of C&R that were NOT in the USA just 20 years ago, are here now in peoples hands. They will end up in garage sales, moving sales, online sales, etc. At least they weren't destroyed in Yugoslavia!

As to the price, people often daydream of that $100 SKS back in 1983... But forget that in todays dollars that is about $225... Not far off where they are priced. Sure, there were better deals when nobody wanted that Chinese junk. Heck my friends dad had one of those "junky" Chinese SKS in the attic for decades along with a crate of ammo.

But now they are popular, everyone understands they are good rifles. It's a double edged sword. Same is happening right now with the Mosin Nagant. That junky rifle when it was $30 is now $100 + and $200 for the carbine. The lesson is that you can't wait on these items.

30 years ago wasn't the hay day because, I imagine, researching C&R and buying online wasn't easy or an option. The sheer selection available probably wasn't like it either is today, or just recently was in the last couple years. While you may have been able to pick up any number of $200 M1 Carbines off the rack, you may not have been able to get much larger selection than that.
 
The $100 SKS kinda' reminds me of making the mistake of picking up a 1960's American Rifleman ... good old Hy Hunter ... and all the others and $49.95 FN49's and G/K-43's by the barrel-full. And then there were the really cheap rifles ... Mausers, Enfields, Carcanos, Rolling Blocks, Trapdoors ... and all the surplus ammo you could dream of ... ALMOST FOR FREE, it was that cheap!

Of course, hardly any kid would have more than a couple of bucks to rub together even after weeks of lawn mowing and gas, even at $0.25/gal or less for Super Shell (with Platformate ... whatever the hell THAT was), would empty your wallet quicker than a flash. Then ... some of us discovered GIRLS and " ... that's the way the money goes ... POP goes the weasel!"

I still think if I had worked just a bit harder and partied little less ... I still coulda' kept girls and had more guns!:rolleyes:
 
"..."good old days" of..." Pay scales were a lot lower too.
"...hope we'll see..." Don't count on it. Most governments are not surplusing firearms these days. Our former gang of idiots chopped thousands of brand new C1A1's that had been in 'War Reserve' since the mid 70's.
 
I like the way you think, WSM, but it ain't that simple. We need to send real conservatives to Congress and make sure they understand the art of the horse dicker.

"Sure, you want a ban on margarine and other trans-fats? Beans, for they produce methane, a greenhouse gas? Coca-Cola because it is American? Why sure. But to fund all that we are going to have to trim some enforcement of laws that are no longer useful. Take this '86 law that imposes undue hardship on machinegun manufacturers by preventing them from developing products important for the national defense...

With that attitude in place in Washington, the states may do as they will; in the present environment, states can't even set their own policy on carding illegals.
 
Considering the laws as they are today, and as someone said above - PISTOLS. Lots and lots of future C&R pistols. :)
 
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