Serial # shenanigans and other shady doin`s

Psalm 144:1

New member
Have a buddy who once accepted a Ruger Security-Six .357 as partial payment of a debt he was owed, with full realization that the weapon`s virtue was (ahem) soiled. The guy had gotten it from another guy....you know the story. The serial numbers had been VERY neatly obliterated. There was absolutely no way to tell who might have been murdered with it,who it was stolen from,etc. It WAS a very NICE revolver,however and my pal accepted it. It became the range queen of his collection,and went NOWHERE except to the shooting place and then back home. He got the heebie-jeebies after awhile and came up with what I acknowledged as a brilliant scheme. He attended a local gun show and found an identical Security-Six.Finish,barrel length,everything. He then recorded the serial number of the legit Ruger and used a set of number dies for metal stamping to peen the same # on the one he had at home. Did a damn fine job of it,too; it looked perfect to me. I saw the internals of both guns. I`m sure that it would have passed even a more than casual examination-in fact there would have had to be a reason to suspect that it was not what it appeared to be before sophisticated identification techniques would have even been applied. Despite all this, he once more got the nervous nellies and sold the gun to another person who for all intents and purposes believes he owns the legitemate article. This was many moons ago (pre GP-100) and I heard him lament recently the rashness of his mispent youth. Sure hope nobody got burned.
 
And.....

Just exactly how many of those sort of guns do you think exist?

Probably more than one would think, perhaps?
 
Serial numbers.

I would think that many exist in various forms. I.E. duplicate #'s, altered#'s, destroyed #'s, etc.
I don't think that there are just hundreds of thousands about, but would it be unbeleivable to guesstimate in the thousands?
Even more prevalent would be the mismatched or renumbered imports.
Just a thought.
 
One would just hope that many years and many owners down the line, someone else doesn't take the fall for it. I'd hate to see some unsuspecting person get burned because of someone else's stupidity.
 
Back
Top