It isn’t easy making a case in favor of the second (the Japanese Arisaka comes in first) least desirable military rifle from the first half of the last century, but Endo-Mike does a great job here.

AR-15: You can melt it with a magnifying glass.
AK-47: Under a magnifying glass, you can see the ingrained dirt.
Mosin-Nagant: Under a magnifying glass, you can see the soaked-in BLOOD. …

AR15: Built with custom parts, nice trigger, all the bells and whistles $1500+
AK47: Modified with aftermarket and 1,000 rounds of ammo not even $1500
Mosin-Nagant: Stock, with 1,000 rounds maybe $300, meaning you get $1200 to spend on more beer …

AR15: Lots of fancy optics available
AK47: You can bolt some stuff to the side
Mosin-Nagant: Who cares about optics when the barrel is long enough to smack the enemy over the head without even leaving your foxhole. …

AR15: Invented 50 years ago by a consummate engineer
AK47: Invented 60 years ago by wounded tank sergeant
Mosin-Nagant: Invented 117 years ago by two drunks on a budget.

Read the whole thing. It’s long, but funny.

This very sad beater of a Mosin Nagant sold recently on Gun Broker for, count it, $1085.00 + $31.00 shipping.

The rifle was rusty, dusty, and thoroughly corroded, with a chipped and banged-up stock and a very worn bore. Why did a gun in such a miserable condition fetch such a fancy price? Historical association.

Its markings revealed that it was Izhvesk Arsenal-made Model 1907 Mosin Nagant carbine cut down from a former Cossack unit Ka3-marked rifle, and it could also be identified as a Model 1916 St. Petersburg Cavalry School carbine on the basis of the metal side-attached bayonet scabbard.

Not really a true Model 1907 carbine, the Model 1916 St. Petersburg Cavalry School carbine was converted from Model 1891 rifles. These have a unique design and only the rear sight is from the 1907 model. All the parts are from Model 91 rifles, except the bayonet scabbard and the barrel bands

Mosin collectors go mad for these rarities, even in vile condition.

Note the side-mounted bayonet scabbard. It is intended to keep the point of the bayonet from stabbing the horse or the rider. One would fit the bayonet backwards onto the muzzle and then slide the tip into the metal side piece.

$5025 for a US Martial Marked Mosin Nagant!

For that kind of money you could buy a state-of-the-art Blaser. You could get a Griffin & Howe Springfield. You could get a Commercial Mauser Sporter. You could buy two Mannlicher Schonauers. And, if you got a little lucky at a gun show, you might even be able to buy a Rigby .275.

This one is obviously a bit uncommon and collectible (if you want to collect -shudder– Mosin Nagants), but speaking personally my mind boggles. Myself, I’m not at all sure that, if Vasilli Zaitsev dropped by and offered to sell me the scoped Mosin sniper he used to pop Major Konig at the Battle of Stalingrad for $5000 smackers, I would actually take him up on it.

Gun Broker:

Excellent condition WWI Remington mfg. Model 1891 Mosin Nagant rifle in 7.62 x 54 caliber that has clear manufacturer markings on the barrel and dated 1917. These rifles were originally produced for Imperial Russia, but when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred deliveries ceased. The U.S. government purchased/contracted the remaining rifles from Remington and used them for training purposes. Remington Mosin Nagant rifles were also issued to American troops during the Siberian “polar bear” expedition during the Russian Civil War. About 78,950 Remington Mosin Nagant rifles were acquired by the U.S. government, out of the 1.5 million originally contracted by Russia. This gun falls in the correct serial number range for U.S. marked Mosins and has good clear and guaranteed original U.S., flaming bomb, and eagle head proof mark cartouche in the stock in front of the triggerguard. Rifle has all matching serial numbers including barrel, bolt body, cocking piece, floorplate, and buttplate. Metal finish is excellent original blue showing very little wear. Bore is bright and excellent with strong rifling. American Walnut stock has beautiful original finish with only a few normal handling marks. Shows a few normal handling marks, right side buttstock has a nice original Remington circular cartouche. This cartouche and the eagle head and flaming bomb proofs have been highlighted in white. Rifle is NOT import marked and NOT Finn marked or modified and is complete with correct original cleaning rod and leather sling. A very rare U.S. military marked Remington Mosin Nagant in excellent condition with all matching numbers that will make an outstanding addition to your collection!

Discussed at Gunboards.

This poor girl had no choice of rifle and had to make do.

I get emails from Quora, inviting responses to questions I previously answered or responded to. One common topic they pertain to is guns.

I don’t normally think of Quora questions and answers as blog fodder, but there was this answer today which was so out there that I feel obliged to quote it and comment on it.

Some unidentified fellow asked:

What would be a good, fairly accurate and easy-to-maintain rifle I could buy without breaking the bank?

I’ve been interested in shooting for a while, and shot .22s, .223s and 7.62 at summer camps and a neighbor of my grandfathers, but never owned my own gun. I would like to get better at shooting and buy my own rifle, but none of my relatives know anything about guns, and a lot of advice I have gotten thus far was for either very expensive or very basic guns. I’m not a bad shot, and don’t need an absolute beginner rifle, but something fairly cheap that still has the recoil, heft and feel of a like a Remington 700 or equivalent gun.
I live in NH, if that helps.

and Bradley Peterson replied:

I just wrote out a thorough answer about the Remington 700, Winchester Model 70, Ruger American, etc. and then I said to myself “screw that”.

Buy a Mosin.

Pay around $200 for a run-of-the-mill 91-30, and you buy a ticket into an all inclusive club of Soviet conscripts, Tsarist soldiers, Finnish and Russian super snipers, Chinese phesants, Vietcong Guerrilas, Olympians, Ukranian Rebels, Bubba, and now, you.

I’d say the rifle is “good”. It has a proven track record – is first version was made in 1891, making the M91, and its 7.62x54r cartridge the longest serving cartridge in existance, and the longest serving rifle design on the battlefield. The cartridge itself is powerful enough to take down any North American game animal. The Mosin is probably the most deadly firearm ever invented – I seriously doubt another has killed more people. Its a sobering thought, but its a piece of history, and you have to accept it for what it is – a tool for breaking and killing things that was used A LOT.

Fairly accurate? It depends on which rifle you get. They are basically all used – coming in crates after years of storage covered in a preservative called cosmoline, and accuracy is a crap shoot. My 91/30 infantry rifle has a bright brand new looking bore, and is pretty darn accurate for having fairly poor iron sights. A realistically sized target is easy to hit out to 200 yards, at least. My PU sniper rifle, like the one held by Roza Shanina in the above photo, will shoot ~1-1/4 MOA. I’ve seen some shoot sub MOA – not bad for a 70 year old WWII rifle.

Ammunition is easy to come by. It was made by the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War by the crap ton, and its cheap, at around $.20 a round, or $100 for a 440 round can.

Did I mention it comes with a bayonet?

You can skewer a pig, drive a screw, or roast marshmellows with this thing (I’ve done the latter). Yeah, you can roast hot dogs with your rifle. Try that with a Remington. You can break bricks with the steel buttplate. The rifle has less than 40 parts. In a pinch, you can shoot a 30-30 round out of it, and the action is ridiculously strong. It is nearly impossible, save a bore obstruction, to blow this rifle up.

The drawbacks? The basic rifle weights around 8.5 lbs. With bayonet, sling, and ammunition, count on 10. Even with that weight, it kicks like a mule. When shooting my sniper rifle with high power commercial loads throwing heavy bullets, it hurts. The rifle is also sighted in with the bayonet attached – meaning to be accurate, you need to add an additional pound, and 1 foot to the end of your rifle, which is already hardly manuverable. You can move around the front sight base and re-zero, but its a pain.

In addition, people will look at your rifle, then at you, and think “poor guy, doesn’t have money for a real rifle”. The course of action to take from here is pretty simple. Put the stripper clip of ammunition into the rifle, and pump that target full of steel. They might try going *pew pew* with their glorified .22s while you produce smoke, fireballs, and a TON of noise, but you go home satisfied, knowing you have an awesome rifle.

I have posted previously on the current craze for purchasing and collecting (cheap, cheap, cheap) Mosin Nagants being imported by the container-load from Russia and other former Soviet Empire countries. The obvious foundation cause of Mosin collecting is the fact that Mosins are cheap right now and are bound to go up in price, the same way SKS-es did, once they run out of them, and the fact that the ammo is incredibly cheap as well.

The only real argument for owning a Mosin (they are really too expensive to use as boat anchors or tomato stakes) is they are very cheap to buy and very cheap to shoot.

They are a historic arm, of course, if you want to get in closer touch with the history of red-beet-munching peasants being conscripted and used as cannon-fodder; of purges, mass executions, and innocent people being marched off to Siberia; of totalitarian dictatorship, human life valued as next to nothing, the clash of two barbarous dictatorships and subsequent Third World wars of Revolution. Why! the proud owner of one of these can hold it in his hands, and imagine all the joys of being driven in mass formations into the fire of German machine-guns by commissars with machine-pistols ready to execute on the spot anyone who falters.

Factually speaking, Mosins are a crude, primitive military long-arm, featuring a design dating back to 1891, older than the Krag and not as good. They are ugly, non-ergonomic, ugly, heavy, ugly, and inferior in every way (other than price) to nearly all the best-known bolt-action rifles of WWI and WWII.

Mosins are at the bottom of heap, battling it out for last place and the title of most inferior and repulsive rifle with the Japanese Arisaka and the Italian Mannlicher Carcano.

What I would say to the unidentified author of the question is: Go to a gun show, or look on Gun Broker, for a nice, good quality sporterized 1903 Springfield or 1917 Enfield or 1898 Mauser or 1909 Mauser. I would suggest looking for one chambered in .30-06 Springfield or .270 Winchester. You will have to pay about double what a Mosin would cost you, but you will have a lot more attractive, lighter, more accurate, more ergometric and –in the long run– more valuable rifle.

A bit awkward when used as a canoe anchor.

Let’s start a fight. I ran across an amusing column in which this fellow Caleb has a go at identifying “the Five Most Over-Rated Guns of All Time.”

The Mosin-Nagant

If I’d written this list 7 years ago, this entry would have gone to the SKS; but as prices have climbed, the SKS is no longer the darling of the TapCo catalog, it’s simply another $250 C&R rifle. The Mosin-Nagant on the other hand? Well it’s now number 5 on this list, because it’s adored by an entire generation of internet fanboys who are too poor to buy a proper rifle, and can’t appreciate a $100 C&R gun for what it is. “If I put $400 worth of crap on my Mosin, it’s just as good as a Ruger American Rifle!” No, you fedora wearing neckbeard, it isn’t. It’s a $100 C&R rifle that’s fought itself in every major war since WW1 and lost every time. But that’s not good enough, because people need to justify their purchases, so instead of just enjoying it, these spazoids have to pretend that they’ve bought a WW2 sniper rifle while they watch Enemy at the Gates for the 3,299th time in their mother’s basement.

I’m not sure what Caleb means by “lost every time.” The Russkies did win WWII, after all, even if it was despite, not because, of using the Mosin-Nagant. I do agree with him that Mosins are ugly, clunky, not terribly accurate rifles with characteristically bad trigger pulls, which bring to mind hordes of sub-human totalitarian slaves making human wave attacks into Nazi machine-gun fire during some of the ugliest moments of human history. In my own view, not even incredibly cheap (corrosive) ammo makes the idea of owning one seem rewarding.

Caleb is right about the Luger, too. The Luger is a cool-looking pistol, but one which is persnikety as all get-out about its ammo, and will jam or even stovepipe rounds at the drop of a hat. One could forgive that problem and just stock up on super-hot 9mm Parabellum cartridges, but insane dealer/collectors have successfully cornered the Pistole 08 market and these old (and usually beat up) pistols are now being offered at the kinds of prices which ought to get you a used car. Lugers are just not worth the money, by an order of magnitude.

Mosin Nagant M44

In every gun shop these days, older classic guns seem to have vanished like the buffalo, but the racks are full of modern black rifles and… Mosin Nagants.

The Mosin Nagant used to be (deservedly) despised as a strong contender for worst 20th century bolt-action military long-arm, fighting it out for the title with the Japanese Arisaka and Italy’s Mannlicher Carcarno.

The Mosin’s recent astounding rise in popularity has nothing to do with accuracy, beauty, or quality of workmanship or design. The Mosin has been snapped up by countless American shooters specifically because, by today’s standards, these old boat anchors are spectacularly cheap. I still could not see the point of owning one of them until, earlier today, I came across this amusing article by “Major Pandemic” which noted that not only are the rifles cheap, surplus ammo is incredibly cheap as well.

Part of the attraction of the cold war Mosin Nagants is that they are excellent rifles for the typical $70-$100 street price, but the even bigger draw is that the ammo, which is comparable ballistically to the .308 or 30-06, can easily be had for a stunningly low $.25 a round. At this point in time there is no other large centerfire rifle that is this inexpensive to shoot.

When you first get your hands on a Mosin, you’re just thrilled that you’ve found a powerful centerfire rifle that only set you back around $100. Then you’ll dance until you got a leg cramp after buying an entire SPAM can of 400 rounds for only another $100. Honestly, in that initial ownership period, you really don’t care how it shoots, when it was made, or by which European factory. You’re just thrilled that it goes bang each time you pull the trigger.

Once you get over the initial fun factor, you’ll probably start looking at upgrades for the rifle. Upgrading a Mosin Nagant is an amazingly fun project that nets a gun that can hunt any North American large game easily out to 300 yards and beyond.

But, here comes the funny part: Great, that Mosin is cheap to shoot, but it also kicks like a mule and groups horribly at a 100 yards. So, naturally, Major Pandemic turns to the question of improving the good old Mosin. The old Russian sights are rudimentary (and most of the people who fool around with guns these days are getting on in years and have weak eyes), so the Major gets himself mounts and a scope.

Getting bashed in the shoulder induces flinching, so a better, sniper-style, gunstock is in order.

Then, something has to be done about the absolutely terrible trigger-pull. $100 worth of Timney trigger is the answer.

Finally, if you want the old war horse to shoot accurately, you’ll need to re-crown that ancient barrel.

And there you have it, a mere $1047.98 later, that hundred-dollar clunker performs like a thousand-dollar-ish new rifle, but you do get to use that cheap surplus ammo.

Or, alternatively, I would say, you could just buy a Lee Loader and reload .30-06 rounds, and buy a decent rifle.

Mouseguns has an anonymous humor item comparing the AK-47, the AR-15, and the Mosin-Nagant.

It reads to me like it was written from a Russian perspective. An American would use the Garand as the older comparison. A really sophisticated connoisseur (i.e., somebody old, like me) would compare the 1903 Springfield.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.