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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (37446)	9/25/2000 10:21:36 PM
From: StanX Long	Respond to of 70976

Ish, I too own a Mauser, it is a beautiful Swiss Mauser from 1930s. I will never shot it. It is part of about fifty collector guns I own. I saw a great add for "Military New" German Mauser from 1945. $300 for a 1945 German Mauser held in Yugoslavia until the Russian break-up. SD Here is the press release. Mitchell’s Mausers Press Release For Release: March, 2000 Collector Grade Mausers! These rifles have been held in reserve for over fifty years and were thus kept in storage for possible military service at any time. During their storage life, they have been maintained, inspected, tested, re-greased, and repacked every five or ten years.An accident of history has preserved these fifty-five year old Mauser rifles in ‘military-new’ condition! This "time capsule" has been opened and these very special Collector Grade Mausers are now being released to the U.S. public.The rifles are fully complete in every respect and every rifle has matching serial numbers on all key components. The rifles are in Military New condition. The price for the rifle with accessories is $295.00!See the following description for full details. An Accident of HistoryMitchell's Mausers are Mauser 98k rifles, known as the Model 48. They are fifty-five years old; yet they are classified as military-new! The reason they are unique and still 'military-new' is that they were built in Kragujevac, former Yugoslavia, during and shortly after WWII. After the Germans were driven out, production continued for a time by the then Communist regime. The rifles were built on German tooling, but are of a more robust construction, because the Yugoslav factories did not experience the materials shortages that cheapened the later German production.Under Nazi control, the Yugoslav people suffered a holocaust, which, when measured on a per-capita basis, was greater than the persecution of the Jews in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in Europe -- a fact that is not generally well known in the West. The most infamous of the extermination camps was located in Jasenovac, where upwards of 1.2 million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies perished at the hands of the Nazi-led Croatian Ustashe.When the Nazi's were finally driven out in 1944 and the war ended, the Serbs, like the Jews, said "Never Again!" To support that posture, they decided to arm the entire populace as an armed militia, even though they were then Communists. Normal gun ownership as we know it here was not allowed, but they knew that if the enemy came again, their basic defense would be the armed peasant.The new production rifles and ammunition were dispersed to military storage facilities around the country. The dispersion started in 1945 in anticipation of WWIII. The now ubiquitous AK47, Dragunov, SKS, and other full-auto and semi-auto infantry weapons soon made these Mauser rifles obsolete for modern combat. Even so, the Mausers were still kept in reserve, military-new and ready for service. They were, however, removed from storage every five or ten years for testing for function, serviceability, and preservation. The real testing was for the reliability of the ammunition, as much as for the reliability of the rifle.And so it continued for over fifty years. Then the Berlin wall came down, Communism died an ignominious death, the Bosnian war started, and Yugoslavia broke apart with five of its seven states becoming independent countries. The newly independent countries were able to take control of the materiel in their various territories.Now, nearly five years after the breakup, Mitchell Manufacturing has scaled the hurdles to make these rifles available. They have contracted for all the "military new" Mausers in the independent countries, and they have obtained all of the proper export and import licenses from the various governments involved, including our own BATF.Hence . . . Mitchell’s Mausers.