I keep picking them up as I find them in my travels - they're inexpensive, great fun to shoot, and typically quite accurate.

The carbines are also truly entertaining to fire - the muzzle blast, pressure drop, and sheer blast is a marvel to behold.

All that for $50 or so a rifle and ten cents a bullet - how could you possibly go wrong?

If you need more information on these rifles, check out Mosin-nagant.net - but ignore the snobbery about the Finn guns. They're nice, cute, and fun, but quite frankly no more accurate than my run of the mill Russians and Romanian cheapies.

The scoped Finn on the right will hit a pie plate two of three times without a bench rest at the 600m line if I'm not having a bad day, but the Romanian carbine (second from left) will shoot anything that moves, walks, or crawls out to 400m that I can see without the aid of ScopeAlmighty(TM).

Left to right:

1941 Russian 91/30, beat but a good shooter with a lot of history behind it.

1954 Romanian M44 carbine with side-folding bayonet, for those days when you gotta extend the bayonet and scare the hell out of whoever else is at the range.

1959 Russian 91/59 carbine, my most accurate rifle to 200m, an unholy concoction of the Cold War made for the Russian military out of World War 2 surplus rifles like the one on the left and put in storage. I'm busily making up for last time with this one.

1942 Finnish-captured Russian 91/30. Everything matches and is original Russian - apparently it was good enough to pass the period Finnish tests and later reworks. It's certainly a better gun than I am a shooter. And yes, that scope mount is high - but I'm 6'8" and it's perfect for little ol' me.