I can remember, when I was a kid in the 50s, newspaper ads in my home town of South Bend, IN, offering milsup rifles at the local department store! You could get an Enfield for $9, or a Mannlicher-Carcano for even less. I lived in Indianapolis in the 60s and recall the same sort of department store sales, at the major establishments. The department stores peiodically ran large ads for these pieces. Further, many of the kids I knew in HS had pistols that their fathers brought back from the service. Guns were much easier to get then...and much less frequently used.