That would be true, If they were only acting on behalf of the seller. But they are not.
Not quite true. The shop is passing along a story of provenance with their marketing of the rifle. It is meaningless in the collector world, unless it can be verified. In this case, it may be true or it may be a lie, but it serves the purpose of disarming a wary buyer. For example:
according to the shop it was a one-owner rifle by a guy who used to work there.
Consistency of a story is critical if it is going to be used to establish provenance. In this case, if the shop has such a close relationship with the original owner, then why the uncertainty about where the recoil pad was installed?
The shop claims the rifle is all original and that the pad is an original Winchester pad that was most likely fitted at the factory.
And that brings us to this...
They certified it's authenticity.
This is meaningless, because they also claimed it was "a right Winchester all original", when this is clearly not the case. A "certification" is only as good as the person providing it. In this case, I am not too confident. Every month I see fraudulent model 70s for sale. Some are easy to spot and others are quite difficult to detect. This one seems to come with plenty of warning signs attached.
They offer a 3 day inspection. Most you would lose is shipping it back.
This helps a lot, and I'd feel a lot more comfortable with the seller is offering these terms.
And for what it's worth, none of the above is intended to come across as me being a jerk. It's just that I am in a constant state of distrust about fraudulent rifles being offered as something they are not. The end effect of all the fake rare rifles on the market is that genuine rifles which cannot prove their provenance end up being of no interest to purist collectors. This is a devastating effect for people who have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested into genuinely rare model 70s, only to find the presence of fraudulent rifles has gutted their ability to sell a real rifle which does not have verified provenance.
The bottom line is this - rare model 70 buyers need to be very wary about fraudulent rare rifles being offered on the market. Many experts say there are more faked rare model 70s on the market than genuine factory originals. I don't know this to be the case, but I see fake rifles all the time. I've also had major collectors ship rifles to me or have me visit them for verification of their collection - the problem is bad enough that many big-time collectors are paranoid they may have ended up with fakes in their collection.
