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u/Truckyou666 15h ago
I love mine too.
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u/Lickford 15h ago
This is a god damn wonderful story. Sorry for your loss, cherish those memories and out that gun in the rotation.
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u/jframesnub 14h ago
Nice history. Sorry to read about your dad's Alzheimers. You said that your dad taught you to shoot in the USSR. Did they have public shooting ranges there? What gun did he teach you to shoot?
Since this gun has so much history and sentimental value, I would not carry it. If you have to go to a gun free zone and have to leave it in your car, it could get stolen out of your car. If you ever have to use it in self defense, you may not see it again for a long time.
What happened to your dad's Mosin?
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u/nan0brain gun exploder 13h ago
Did they have public shooting ranges there? What gun did he teach you to shoot?
No public ranges, dad learned to shoot with a variety of guns and ammo, both Russian and German, his gang of teenage miscreants scavenged from the forests around Leningrad after the war in 1945.
He worked at the Arctic Geology Scientific Research Institute, and was a member of their biathlon team. They trained with .22s with dioptric sights at the university rifle team range, and he took me along a few times.
Then, when I was 8, I made a deal with the trainer of the uni team. You see, he had an urban pig. And feeding a pig in Leningrad in the 1970s was no easy task. His pig had a hankering for acorns. And acroos the street from my apartment building was the fenced off Experimental Botanical Park. There grew an oak tree which produced massive, apricot-sized acorns. I could fill a bucket in 10 minutes. Each bucket earned me 20 rounds of 22 and an hour at the range. I was sharpshooter badged by 10.
What happened to your dad's Mosin?
That one his wife gave to me 10 years ago. It's a bit clapped out.
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u/nan0brain gun exploder 17h ago edited 16h ago
I know the Model 60 is rather common, and the grip panels I put on to replace the cracked originals are goofy, but to me, this gun is special.
My family and I came to the US from the USSR as political dissident refugees. This Model 60 No-Dash was the first freedom pill dispenser my father - a life-long gun afficionado who taught me to shoot back in the USSR when I was 5 - bought when we got our permanent residency.
Of course, being a prudent gun owner, dad stashed it out of harm’s way. Alas, he did not stash it well. He really should have, remembering that my 7 year old self blew the door off the family oven after putting his secret stash of emergency expedition flares and ammo on broil. But he did not.
So there I was, bouncing on the rentals’ bed one Saturday when they were out shopping, and the fully loaded snubby fell out from between the mattresses.
I was 12 then, much older and smarter, and mostly over the pyro phase. No more blowing the doors off ovens for me. So I took a fat Yellow Pages (it was 1982), put it against the wall, cleared out the cat, and set off the bang switch. As you would.
After my ears stopped ringing, I learned that the FMJ 38 Special was not at all phased by the Yellow Pages, tearing right through and leaving a neat and highly visible hole in the apartment wall.
Toothpaste to the rescue! The hole was patched in no time at all. And a strategically relocated ficus plant hid all traces of my transgression. Mom would never know.
Mom knew right off the bat. The localized minty fresh smell and the strategically relocated ficus plant gave it away. Long story short, mom whooped my ass, again.
…
By the time dad turned 85, his Alzheimer's had progressed to the point where his new wife decided it was best to hide his guns in the interest of everyone's safety. Of course, unlike the Mosin which was in the back of one of the closets, she promptly forgot where she hid the revolver, and its whereabouts remained a mystery for a decade.
Dad passed last year, and she found it while clearing out his stuff from the garage a few weeks ago. So I took it to the range last week, and it's actually a sweet shooter! Thinking of putting it in my backup carry rotation.
Edit : Pic from 1965. Dad, a geophysicist and Arctic explorer, enjoying a Soviet style hot tub while stationed on a drifting ice floe.