Mosins now hard to find

The most missing gun of the the current panic may not be the AR. You can still order those. And they're still making them.

But it dawned on me a couple of weeks ago, store racks have become void of the aged Soviet standard, the five shot, bolt action Mosin Nagant. These rifles were selling at most every gun store, gun show or pawn shop for about a hundred bucks or a little more right up until the gun grabbers starting pushing panic.

Mosin Nagant 91/30 with scout scope replacing rear  iron sight and an after-market butt pad

Last night I noticed something else. The cheap military surplus Russian or Bulgarian ammo supplies for the Mosins have dried up as well. Only a couple online sellers still showed some in stock, but one of them was selling spam cans of 440 rounds for $179, that's well over double what it could have been had for a month ago.

The Mosins are great rifles, but some of them can be fussy until you work out sticky bolt issues resulting from past service. And they can pack a wallop with their recoil if using their conventional ammo.

If you snapped one up, check it and clean it thoroughly. Consider adding a rubber butt pad to help tame the recoil. And if you're shooting mil-surp ammo, understand its corrosive nature and how to properly clean the rifle afterwards.

I'd like to think this particular rifle type and ammo outage is a short term thing. But even if supply catches up this time around, sooner or later, stockpiles of these Cold War and earlier relics will eventually be exhausted.

Update 6:21 pm EST 1/21/20013: Noticed a short time ago that SGAmmo.com has restocked surplus Russian ammo for Mosin. Sold by the 880 round case for $159.50, they've sold about five in the last 20 minutes. As of 6:20 pm EST, they have 287 cases in stock. Oops. Three more out the door. Now 284...

Update: Now fewer than 30 cases on hand as of noon on 1/22/2013.

Update: SGAmmo sold out of this batch of 7.62x54r just before 1:30 pm EST.