There’s accumulating guns—and then there’s collecting. The thing that distinguishes the latter from the former is that there’s generally a theme to a collection. It’s not that one’s better than the other, and there’s often a fair bit of overlap, but collectors generally have a running list in their head of desired acquisitions; the next “Grail gun” to add to the safe, if you will.
This used to be more difficult in the olden times. However, along came the various web forums, whether brand-centric, themed around a certain type of shooting sport or hunting or specific to a state or other geographic location. Collecting, say, Rugers or Smith & Wessons became a lot easier when you could peruse the buy/sell/trade board on a Ruger or Smith & Wesson fan site.
Then came the auction sites. If you weren’t aware, in its earliest days, eBay actually allowed the listing of firearms before getting cold feet at the regulatory and political morass and pulling out in 1999. The market vacuum was quickly filled by specialized firearm-auction sites. These days, if one has a sufficient bank balance and some leisure time to surf the internet, a lot of the drama and suspense has been taken from the previously intriguing hunt for the next piece in a collection.
While this is convenient, it somehow feels less than—well, sporting.
Having come up in that earlier world as something of a casual collector, I feel like something’s been lost, at least in regard to the things that made it feel fun to me. The two big variables were availability and affordability.
It was easy to control for affordability. If one was making only gun-counter-clerk wages in the 1990s, one knew that the Colt Pythons and Peacemakers or Smith & Wesson Registered Magnums and Triple-Locks were pretty much off the table, but post-war S&W Hand Ejectors or the more common varieties of Colt autoloaders were still in the attainable range. Furthermore, unless you were attending major auctions or had some other sort of “in,” the playing field was pretty well level.
If you’re a bazillionaire with the ability to quickly scan all the auction sites for whatever rare $15K Luger variant tickles your fancy and buy every copy for sale in the U.S. right now, I won’t lie: I’m a little bit envious. But, that also kinda feels like some 19th century “hunt” with a sahib paying to shoot a tiger chained to a post.
Now, I will confess to the gun-collecting equivalent of “hunting over bait,” in that I spent many a year working behind the counters of gun shops, which is where people bring in guns to sell or trade. I well remember, back in the height of my military-surplus collecting phase, standing in the gunsmithing shack at work, chatting with the ’smiths about something work-related, when one of our regulars dipped in the back to show off the rifle he’d just acquired as part of a collection.
“Bet y’all haven’t seen one of these before,” he drawled. I looked it up and down. It had a large-ring Mauser action, a deep belly to the stock around the magazine, and a sliding sheet-metal cover over the bolt reminiscent of that on an Arisaka.
“OHMIGOD!” I squealed, “A Siamese 1903 Mauser!”
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he was expecting this reaction from me, but, to be fair, I hadn’t seen a Siamese Mauser outside of some black-and-white photos in collectors’ guides and a few bubbaized sporters.
I checked the contents of my pockets and then scuttled off to a corner of the gunsmithing shack to pull out my phone and dial 1-800-AM-I-BROKE to see if my paycheck had cleared. It had, and I was soon a proud Siamese Mauser owner.
This is the sort of thrilling collecting I remember. It was like seeing that once-in-a-lifetime buck come strolling out of the woods when you’re expecting a dull afternoon and reading a comic book in the tree stand to kill time before going back to tell lies around the campfire. Someone nowadays might plug “Mauser, Siamese” into a search engine on an auction site, but it’s just not the same.
If you want to do it the easy way, I’m not going to hate on you—well, not publicly at least. But, I will tell you that there are some intermediate steps that can greatly aid your collectible chops without completely outright throwing in the towel on your amateur status.
The first and easiest is developing a relationship with your local FFL, the one with whom you do the most of your business. I know my current collecting mania, Smith & Wesson semi-automatics, has benefitted from the fact the guys at Indy Arms Company know that’s my jam and I’ll get a call if one they think I’d like turns up for sale.
When I’m working in sales, I keep a list of my regular customers and their particular proclivities; no sense letting some World War II Walther P-38 languish in the case when I know I can call Norm Smith and he’ll swing by on the way home from work to grab it.
In fact, at the first shop where I worked, we had one of those sorts of regulars who’d hang out on Saturday mornings and even help behind the counter a bit when things got busy. He’d travel for work and we’d let him have a couple photocopies of the shop FFL. That way, when he was out checking out the local gun stores and pawn shops for antique Colts during his off hours, he could just hand them the FFL copy and have his discovery shipped to us.
This is the good, old-fashioned shoe-leather work that makes the “fair chase” style of gun collecting so much fun; checking the used counters at local shops and trawling the tables at the local gun show. Ducking into unfamiliar shops when you’re on the road to scope the inventory of used and collectible pieces. Networking with other collectors.
Once, while perusing the “Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson” with my friend Marko, we came across the description of the Performance Center Model PC13, described as “a very serious carry revolver.” Marko was immediately smitten.
“One of these might be at the show this weekend!” he surmised hopefully.
“Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt. It says right here they made only 200 of them five years ago. What’re the odds one’ll be there?”
Pretty good, as it turned out.
You just can’t get that kind of excitement scrolling a mouse pointer across a screen. You gotta get out there and hunt.
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