Well, let me mention that I'm a woodworker and have done quite a few stocks in several different ways, and have finished plenty of wood furniture that I've made over the last 25 years. And I've commented on this forum many times on various ways to finish gunstocks. As for blotching, and control of such, those minwax blotch control materials really don't work that well. Best option is a thinned dewaxed shellac for blotch control. Nothing much else works very well.
All that said, my mention of the Varathane stain & Poly was because it worked so darn well on the cheap pine table that I refinished. If it wasn't for the knots, you'd never know it was pine. And I thought it might work real well for somebody with a cheap wood stock that didn't want to work too hard on a refinish job. Like one of ya'll mentioned however, knock off a chunk of the finish and you'll see the white wood under it. So it isn't a perfect solution to stock refinishing, but I think it'd work pretty well for some folks.
The few times that I've redone the really cheap white wood stocks, they really blotched badly. After several tries and finish removal once again, a surface stain/poly worked best, over a thin coat of dewaxed shellac. They came out real well, but truth is (my opinion anyway) is that it's hardly worth the effort to try to refinish one of those stocks. I did it for good friends, but it was a lot of work for a stock probably worth $10 or less.
I didn't mean to start a debate, but just to throw out another option to folks wanting a cheap fast refinish that'll hold up to some abuse.
