The Good Old Days

摘要

Occasionally, someone will post an old "machine guns for sale" advertisement from the 1960s on one of the popular Class III oriented internet boards, with the ads featuring unbelievably low prices compared to those encountered today. When a young enthusiast reads the ads, they often wish they could travel back in time. Well it's hard to believe today, but during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s machine guns, although far less expensive, were noi seeing as quickly as they do currently. One reason for relatively slow machine gun sales in those days was that few knew the protocol of buying a machine gun or where to find one for sale. There was basically no single source of information on machine gun ownership The subject of Class 111 firearms was largely ignored by the mainstream supermarket gun magazines. There were only a few deaters that dealt in Class III. For exam-Die in 1965 there wasareported total of only three Class III dealers in the entire country. Probably the best known of the early dealers was J controversial Curtis Earl, through his catalogs and advertising. Mr. Earl predicted that machine guns would continua ly escalate in price. On the back of his catalogs was a bar graph titled Machme Guns Your Best Investment. The graph illustrated from 1965 to 1979 an increase of 2,080 percent in machine gun prices, with a yearly average increase of 149 percent.