Boomsticks: It followed me home...

I helped deplete the Armory's dwindling store of Finnish Mosins by taking a nice M28 home for Christmas. It doesn't have the Tikkakoski "T-in-a-triangle" atop the chamber, and although I haven't pulled it out of the stock yet to check, I suspect it has a SIG-Neuhausen barrel. It now sits next to the 1944-dated VKT M39 in my closet and swaps war stories, the two of them pointedly ignoring the Izhevsk M91/30 to their right.

It's in fair condition for a Finn, which would be Very Good to Excellent for most other countries. You'll sometimes see the "Nation Of Riflemen" phrase tossed around on gunblogs, but if you want to see it in the metal, look at surplus rifles from Finland, Switzerland, or Sweden; even those that are well used tend to have bores, sights, and barrel crowns in much better shape than, say, their Russian, Turkish, or Italian counterparts. The sharpest contrasts can be found in American and British rifles: An Enfield straight from British or Canadian service is almost always a gem compared to one that has been beaten on by the Pakistani army, while an M1903 that went to the DCM from the US military looks like a pampered match rifle compared to one abused and neglected in Greek exile.

I'm not much of a Mosin fan still, being a lover of All Things Mauser, but these Finns are beginning to get to me. There's a lot of interest in Finnish militaria in the US; we love underdogs and hate bolsheviks, so the heroic resistance of the little Finnish Army against the Soviet juggernaut can't help but fascinate us. As the home of both TGI and Brent Snodgrass, Knoxville is a good place to be interested in Finnish militaria, too. Maybe I ought to grab that last M28/30 at the shop...