Valuable WWII Gun at Police Buy-Back
 

You never know what you might have in your closet:

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs...opstories.html

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Good thing the cops knew their stuff. I wonder how many other collectibles have been destroyed by people who didn't know.

Interesting find! I wonder how many weapons US WW2 vets brought home.

However a hell of an article...:-?
I'll let the "Nazi Assault Gun" slide for media sensation, the "expert's" statements however:
Ahh, the old but wrong legend. Seems like Lewis knows Crab about rifles...
Just like his collegue, an alleged gun range master:
well, I didn't know that either... :rotfl2:

Adolf,:hmmm:

Theat rifle was on one of those pawn shows with the guys that deal only in guns not long ago.

I love this statement..

"If the gun had been in the closet loaded, any second you could hit the wrong level and discharge a fatal round," he said of the Sturmgewehr 44."

How silly, it applies with any loaded gun.....

US troops got pretty good at shipping back weapons during WWII so good that by 1944 they started x-raying large packages after they found some MG-42s that had been well concealed but they could not get everything.

Some soldier likely field stripped that STG and shipped it back one part at a time.

The AK47 is not a copy of the STG44 either...sheesh for starters they have entirely different bolts and the operation is quite different. Now the AK47 design was obviously influenced by the STG but this is the case with every single firearm ever designed they all take ideas from other designs just like the Vz.58 not a copy of the AK47.I wonder how well those two "expert" cops even know their own duty weapons I bet they cant even field strip their Glocks.

Not just in WWII; I knew a few guys who brought back or had shipped back weapons from 'Nam in the 60s and 70s. A guy I knew as a friend of the family in about 1970-71 was a LRRP and had some very impressive souvenirs...

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Exactly, it borrowed a lot from the Garand and the M1 Carbine in addition to the STG.

As far as I'm aware it was one hell of a weapon in its day and must have been a highly sought after prize.

Well you can fill out a war trophies form and if it is not a legal weapon if you have it demilitarized you can keep it so an AK or from Vietnam most likely a type 56 if you had the firing pin removed and welded over and a rod in part of the barrel you can keep it.Now an SKS or Type 56(SKS they used the same number for both the AKM and the SKS in China) that is a semi auto 10 round magazine so that gun you could keep as is.If he brought back a working type 56 he did not do it legally. If it is not a type 56 then it most likely is not from Vietnam as 85~90% of the NVAs small arms where from China the advanced gear came from the USSR.

My father was also a LRRP 67-68,68-69 but he was never into the war trophy thing he was more a photography man and has easily 2 or 3 thousand pictures many taken during operations and they did find lots of arms caches.

The guns I was shown were fully operational though I doubt he really ever fired them much if at all...

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The vet showed you these or your friend?

Im just saying you can take any modern AK clone and make it look like a type 56 if you want to but a real NVA type 56 would have a date of manufacture of a certain date early to late 60's and also it would have a two position selector first being fully automatic second being semi auto if you only moved the selector switch once it is a fake and really a civil market firearm.

I have seen fakes before there is this Vietnam Vet group and they go around to schools and talk to kids about Vietnam they showed us what they claimed to be a type 56 that was demilitarized
when I was in high school I looked at it and could tell it was really a Chinese type 56 for the civil US market made in the late 70's and I called them on it.

The vet showed them to me; he was afamily friend at the time I saw them, about 1970 or 1971...

I don't think he exactly followed protocol or procedure to get the weapons into the US...

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Do you still know this person? I wonder what he ever did with those guns if he was smart hed have tossed them into a lake or something or sold them and got rid of them.I know for a fact that you cant keep a working automatic weapon as a trophy even if you have the legal means to own one back in the states.

Hopefully he never got himself into trouble having those weapons.Even today if anyone where to get caught with those they would be looking at a felony and a prison term.

So even if you'd possess a Class III license and maybe have the gun tested by the ATF that it complies to US standards? Or would this break international law, e.g. weapon export laws?