Swiss Diversion

Well this site has been dormant for a few months not due to any one particular reason, but rather due to a host of reinforcing demands on my time and attention, which taken singly are rather poor excuses for the neglect. For whatever reason—guilt most likely— I thought I'd share one of them with you.

Right about the time of my last post here I'd been shopping for a house gun. That's right, a gun. I'm forty-two years old and I've never purchased a gun in my life in spite of the fact that I was raised shooting them. Just before last September 11th, Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit made a half-serious crack about how we should all mark the infamous date's passing by buying guns. Initially I took the suggestion in the spirit in which it was given, but then I encountered this site and my attitude abruptly changed. For the first time I realized that in spite of having an old Remington .22 which I'd gotten as a Christmas gift when I was a teenager buried at the back of my closet, I've essentially been remiss all these years in never investing in a weapon (and the proficiency required to handle it responsibly) capable of the firepower necessary to protect myself and my family should the need arise. It's not about fear of criminals or tyrants, it's more about about free men accepting grown-up responsibilities in an uncertain world. We should all have an accurate, hig-powered rifle for the same reason we have insurance and 401k accounts.

Anyway, while searching for my idea of the perfect house gun—a double-barrel twenty gauge with exposed hammers—I came across a "mil-surp" rifle that captured my imagination from, of all places, Switzerland. As many know, Swiss citizens have been required for generations to participate in their democratic confederacy's military for most of their lives, and are even issued battle rifles to keep in their homes along with some ammunition so that they may mobilize at a moment's notice. From 1933 to 1958, Swiss militiamen were issued the Karabiner 31, or K-31, a six-shot straight-pull bolt action rifle. They are currently available for $100-200, fire a cartridge remarkably similar to the .30-06, and enjoy a reputation for being one of the most accurate battle rifles ever generally issued. On September 11th, I ordered two of them from a dealer in North Carolina, along with my twenty gauge. They arrived a few days later.

Like most military surplus rifles, the ones I received had a lot of wear showing on their wooden stocks. The black water stains you can see around their butt plates is due to the Swiss practice of stacking them in threes, tripod-like, outside of their tents in the snow. Most of the gashes at the bottom of the stocks are from the militiamen kicking them free from the frozen snow in the morning with their hobnail boots. Unlike most military surplus rifles however, the K-31s on the market today have mostly pristine metal, owing to their fine original workmanship (their barrels were manufactured by Hammerli and Sig) and the care the Swiss took with them. Thankfully the Swiss didn't store them in cosmoline grease as was the preferred long-term storage method of the US military. Here's a couple of pictures of mine as I received them:

One is a 1941 issue, the other is a 1943, both with walnut stocks (the Swiss later switched to beechwood). I then proceeded to spend the next two months finding every bit of information I could on these rifles so I could restore them to a facsimile of what they looked like when they were issued. Believe it or not there are at least a half a dozen bustling US-based message boards devoted to this rifle. Long-story-short, here's the finished product:

I presented one of them to my wife as a fifteenth anniversary present. It's certainly the weirdest one she's ever gotten from me.