Could also be a gun held at military installations for loaning to guys who wanted to shoot recreationally. They were stamped with government property markings too. A BIL who treated the guys in his crew to a day of jungle hunting outside of Subic Bay went to the rec center and signed out a mixed bag of shotguns and rifles. As I recall him telling it, a couple of monkeys bit the dust.
An uncle who was a gunnery instructor in Texas for a while before getting a gig in a B-29 said they had Brownings, Savages, Remingtons, and Winchesters for initial instruction on the skeet fields. After getting somewhat proficient with shotguns they moved on to .30 machine guns. He used to laugh about how piss-poor shots most of those guys were, and would yell at them about knuckling down or the Germans/Japanese would have their hash. (There was the coyote who scampered away in a cloud of machine gun dust when several of his guys tried to nail it when it ventured onto the target range.)
Last edited by gnoahhh; 08/12/14.
