Yesterday I was in town and checked out the pawn shop. Sometimes, late in the hunting season they will have new ( to me ) rifles in there.
The one I saw today was an old Italian Mannlicher-Carcano service rifle that was in really poor condition. The barrel had been cut off short ( still legal though ) and the whole thing was covered with pits and rust, including what I could see of the bore. The bore was orange-brown, and fuzzy-looking.
They hadn't even bothered to smear a little oil on the outside of it.
A little tag on the trigger guard said "30-30".
They wanted 199.00 bucks for it.
I said something to the clerk about it not being a 30-30 rifle, and he just shrugged. He was busy with a customer.
Later on, I called the cops and told them the story. Maybe the pawn shop folks will pay attention to a cop.
"I'm not trying to be mean, or anything", I told the lady cop on the phone, "but I don't like to think about somebody getting hurt with that thing."
- So the Mannlicher-Carcano was a wall-hanger, maybe worth ten bucks. ( If you like to decorate with chopped-up, rusty old military guns. )
They did have a good-looking pellet rifle, but they were just as optimistic on the pellet gun's price as they were on the rusty old wall-hanger.
On the other hand, one time I walked in there and they had a Browning A-bolt stainless stalker in .243 for 300 bucks... Reasonably clean too, but I didn't need a .243 and decided to let somebody else snatch that one up.
It's a crap-shoot whenever you walk into a place like that. - You never know what you're going to find.
On the phone, I told the lady cop that I was a retired gunsmith... Hopefully that will discourage any ideas about fixing me up with a job or something. The nearest gunsmith is 30 miles away and kinda iffy - but I've put in my time, and I just work for myself these days.
It's amazing how insistent some people will get when you try to explain that you're a retired gunsmith!
Pawnshop find
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