THere are, unfortunately, only so many guns. Really the final frontier for Ian at this point is Russia since that's pretty much the one country he hasn't been able to really get into their museums but I highly doubt that he's gonna get the proper permissions due to world politics.
I think there's a lot more guns than some imagine (probably there's many things from the Civil War which he hasn't covered), but at the same time, I do think he would be wise to slow his pace somewhat.
Russia has fantastic treasure troves of historical prototypes in state and factory collections, and a lot of civilian and LEO market firearms which just don't get seen in the West, so if he could one day make some trips over there, I think that would be mountains of good content. Guys like Maxim Popienker could vouch for him.
Of course, this hinges on current political developments, so it could well be many more years until he gets the opportunity to do that.
He claimed to have a large backlog, but when he began digging out the shotgun videos I began to doubt that. He's in for a nasty surprise if he thinks he can keep up with his regular format of bitesize videos.
Some of it may be pre-emptive as well, throwing in filler as to slow down the expenditure of his backlog.
No one wants surplus rifles as a collector with African gobbledy gook markings.
Trench art is trench art to me, be it from Slobodan Slobodanovich carving in "REMOVE KEBAB" on the handguards of his Zastava AK, or Mbele von Umbubu carving in whatever tribal symbols or religious iconography in the stock of his Mauser rifle.
until you realize no one gives a fuck about Ethiopia and most likely you will receive a paper weight.
I must disagree here, because if you're collecting, you ought to collect because it's interesting to YOU, if it's not interesting to anyone else, that shouldn't matter. Ethiopia being a country with a long history of Christianity actually makes them interesting to me, and I wouldn't mind an unusual wallhanger or two, for an agreeable price.
Now, that Royal Tiger charges out the ass for guns with undisclosed sewer pipe bores, that's a separate issue.
A lot of the concern around the JFK assassination was that the rifles never worked and the ammo was crap.
That's a half-truth. The rifles actually work perfectly fine, and are basically comparable to Mosin Nagant rifles, crude and not very refined, but workable. P.O Ackley never blew one up, mind.
Issue is more that available ammunition in the US hasn't been consistent, and you could find multiple different surplus loads when buying a quantity of ammunition you'd expect to be just one kind.
Allegedly this is a problem which may go back to Italy, with different manufacturers loading their ammunition to their 'preferred' spec, and with this not being accounted for by Italian military logistics.
This part is an unsourced anecdote which I don't know if it's true, so take it with a grain of salt.
Whether the ammunition differed and was mixed up during original production, or mixed up by careless American importers, along with known cases of US commercial ammo being loaded with incorrectly sized projectiles (which happened with both 6.5mm Carcano and 7.35mm Carcano), it would stand to reason that practical accuracy with ammunition like this would be bad in that circumstance.
Given, however, that some users have reported
good accuracy with their own Carcano rifles, even back in the 1950s and 1960s, it would also stand to reason that consistent sources of appropriate ammunition has been available too.
Oswald was noted as a good marksman during his military service, and if he had a rifle and some consistent ammunition to practice with and to familiarize himself with the gun, there really would be nothing strange about him making the shots he did in the time he did. The state of the wounds and the recovered projectiles isn't even strange, given that old style of cylindrical round nosed bullets these cartridges used kind of did shit like that in the field.
The Carcano rifle and its ammunition is a big red herring for people who are looking at different angles for the JFK assassination, Oswald actually making those shots is pretty convincing in itself, rather it's worth questioning if he was who he and others claimed he was.
I think Othais and Ian both have denied rocking the boat or at least plead ignorance on helping the market "correct itself" when they present a five-page dissertation on how a particular firearm is not actually dangerous junk while firing it in the same breath.
I think in
some ways this is good. I suspect that quite a lot of 'Chinese Mystery Pistols' were disregarded as the valueless junk it often is on the surface, and thus turned in to buybacks or otherwise destroyed, not just in the US but elsewhere as well.
Until very recently, there's been little documentation and literature at all about those guns, and I'd rather someone charge $500 on Gunbroker for a lopsided FN1900 clone which may have had some history in that era of China, than it being thrown into a smelter.