Sniper!

I’ve written before about the Mosin-Nagant rifle, and I thought I would return to that topic to tell you a little bit about how I got into playing with these fine old Russian infantry rifles.

I had seen Mosin-Nagants on the discount racks at what I had always considered low end gun outlets (Big 5 Sporting Goods and other general purpose stores), but I never considered purchasing one. The Mosins on the rack were filthy, caked in cosmoline with dinged-up stocks.  They initially sold for $59 here in the US a few years ago, and they looked like $59 rifles to me.   Cheap.  Not up to my standards.  I was and still am a gun snob.  I thought the Mosins were too dirty to even handle, let alone purchase.  Nope, not my speed, I thought.  Any rifle that Big 5 was selling for $59 was not worth my time or consideration.   Ah, if only I knew where prices were headed, and just how good these rifles are.

Fast forward a bit, and I was teaching a class on engineering creativity at Cal Poly Pomona. One of the techniques engineers can use to inspire their creativity is called TRIZ. It’s a technique that came to us from the old Soviet Union, and it involves looking at older designs in different product areas for ideas.   A classic example is Paul Mauser’s bolt action rifle, which is said to have been based on a common gate latch (in fact, I used of photo illustrating this as the cover shot for Unleashing Engineering Creativity).

One of my young students approached me after class to tell me about the Mosin-Nagant he and his father had purchased (at Big 5) for under a hundred bucks, and how much fun they were having with it. That planted a seed, and when I stopped in for my weekly gun-gazing fix at a local gun shop later that week, I bought a Mosin they had on the rack for $129.  The kid who showed it to me put it in the box when I started my 10-day waiting period (here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia we have a lot of goofy gun laws).  What neither that young man nor I knew was that there was a bayonet in the Mosin-Nagant’s cardboard box, and when he slid the rifle into it, the bayonet scratched the hell out of the stock.

Live and learn, I guess.   I wasn’t upset.  In fact, I was glad. The rifle was inexpensive enough that I saw the bayonet scar as an opportunity to completely strip the rifle down, do a trigger job, glass bed the action, and refinish the stock.  I did, and the rifle went from being a banged-up, gouged-up, cosmoline-encrusted derelict to…well, a  thing of great beauty. I kid you not, as the saying goes. Every time I take my Mosin to the range, I get compliments.  It’s the rifle you see in the photo at the top of this blog.

But that’s not the whole story. The rest of this story is that the thing can shoot. I only shoot my own reloads, and the results are phenomenal. I have a jacketed bullet load I use and another load for cast bullets . Both are extremely accurate. My $139 Mosin is the most accurate open-sighted rifle I’ve ever shot.   Who knew?

That accuracy thing is not unique to my rifle. My good buddy Paul bought a Mosin after listening to me rave about my Russky rifle (in fact, several of my friends bought their own Russian war horses after listening to me babble on and on about mine). Paul found out his rifle was a former sniper weapon, and he asked me to try it. I did. I put three of my reloads through it, and after firing the first shot, I thought I missed on the second two (the target was 50 yards downrange, and all I could see at that distance was one hole). When I looked through the spotting scope, though, it told a different story.

The Mosin sniper rifles are amazingly accurate.  When the U.S. military equips snipers, our armorers build the rifles from the ground up to assure extreme accuracy.  The Russians did it differently.  The Russians built approximately 17 million Mosin-Nagants from 1891 on, and they range fired every one of them.  When they found a rifle that was particularly accurate, it was designated as a sniper weapon.  It was one of those rifles you see in the photo above.

The price on Mosin rifles is climbing.   Today they go for something north of $300.  But trust me on this:  They are still a bargain at that price.  And wow, can they ever shoot. If you’ve ever thought about buying one, there’s no time like right now.  I think prices are going to continue to climb.

We include gun stories here on the ExNotes blog because we like to shoot and we like to write about shooting.  The feedback we get from you, our motorcycle blog followers, tells us you enjoy reading about gun stuff.  The collection of ExNotes gun stories continues to grow, and we want to make it easy for you to find it.  So, another bit of news…we’ve added a Tales of the Gun index page on the ExNotes site!

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