Melkiper: Well done!
A friend who retired years ago with the Navy Marksmanship Team mentioned something that I had read about H&R barrels (he won over a dozen M-1s as prizes in matches): the best barrels ever installed in Garands reportedly were manufactured by H&R in Birmingham, AL.
Saturday I paid my first visit to the Anniston store and bought an M-1 Special, but only because there were no (0) Service Grades on the rack to select in person, and it might be Quite A While before they appear again on a rack in Anniston or Camp Perry. Anniston staff told me that "We are 5,000 M-1s behind because of ammo orders".
If we consider:
1) The on-going demand from last spring,
2) The newest, anti-2nd Amendment ATF "Kommissar" (Director),
3) The serious possibility that we could have Queen Hillary in the White House, after 2016 (most of the media and $$ from the vast Clinton Machine are behind her, the GOP is fragmented...),
4) The misunderstandings centered around Obama's recent Executive Order (despite the CMP being exempt),
5) The fact that there will be another gun panic in the future,
6) There might be no more than very modest numbers of decent Garands to be returned by foreign govts to our DOD, I suggest that anybody who will ever want an M-1 should order it very soon. The CMP can only receive guns which were Loaned to foreign govts., and returned via the DOD.