this is my view......I'm a veteran and I LOVE military type firearms for instance my dad gave me a pre WWI Colt 1911. It's not a family heirloom, but I'm a fan of military weaponry. I inherited a Browning Sweet 16 that my great grandfather won in a turkey shoot LONG time ago. Yeah it's a nice gun, BUT it is not my type of firearm. So this is where my thinking comes in, if I can sell/trade for money to buy another classic (M14, M1 Garand, etc...) then it's a win/win situation. The Browning will go to someone who will better appreciate it and I will get a firearm that I will appreciate. Both of my boys LOVE guns/military stuff. If I were to keep the shotgun and pass it along, it would get sold for who knows what. If I pass along a M1A/M1 Garand, my boys WILL appreciate them.....Just my opinion.....Kind of like me selling my sports stuff here last week. I saved it for 25+ years for my kids. They didn't want it so I sold it all and bought a gun to pass along in the future....
I would like to buy back the type 99 arisaka that my grandpa gave me. In a fit of stupidity i sold it like an idiot,the guy whom i sold it to wont even return my PM's
I'm having to deal with the inheritance thing right now. I'm encumbered with guns to the point where it's become a problem. Most of them aren't worth much intrinsically, but lots of them have memories attached. I don't know what to do. When I think about selling some of them off I hit this mental wall.
That's the point where you have to look at them and say to yourself, is this a gun that I really have memories attached to or is it just a gun that the person you inherited it from bought at a gun show or from another person and just simply had it in their possession. How many of them were just guns sitting in the safe and never used? How many of them did you not even know about? Subtract those from the ones that you remember shooting or them shooting or built some experiences with.
what I am taking away from this is the guns that mean the most are "meat guns" then there are the "they don't make them like that anymores"
currently I have 4 generations represented including myself and I am bumfuzzled about where they will go.
I did the will thing 3-4 years ago and had to leave it up to my executor.
daughter has no interest except cash value, son was asking about them in the same conversation he told me his current gf was pregnant and he was being sued for child support; and he believes in "better living through chemistry" and I am concerned about how they would be used.
currently I have 4 generations represented including myself and I am bumfuzzled about where they will go.
I did the will thing 3-4 years ago and had to leave it up to my executor.
daughter has no interest except cash value, son was asking about them in the same conversation he told me his current gf was pregnant and he was being sued for child support; and he believes in "better living through chemistry" and I am concerned about how they would be used.
My dad "inherited" his interest in firearms from me, but he was always buying and selling his firearms to try something new and different. When I inherited his firearms, none of them had any special significance so I sold them off. All except one - the H&R Model 12 military trainer that I bought for him when he first got into .22 target shooting. That rifle became his favorite, and the only one he kept through the years, so I'm keeping it.
I've inherited quite a few firearms from my dad & grandpa. I have no kids, siblings or other people to leave then to who would have any attachment to them. They were older hunting firearms I have no practical use for. At this point, my forearms will pass to my wife who has no use for them, then my nephew by marriage who has his own and will have no sentimental attachment to them.
I've sold all but two of them. I kept a black powder Thompson Hawken of my dad's and an H&R 16ga with a 4 digit serial number of my grandpa's. Neither of them is worth selling, but they have some sentimental value to me. I see no reason to keep every gun ever handed down to me when I'll not be using them. So I let them move on to someone who might make some memories with them and hand them down to someone else.
Perhaps I'm just not a very sentimental person, but I hang onto very few things I have no use for.
I guess the sentimentality associated with my grandpa's gun is in the fact that there is a lack of memories there that I wished didn't exist. He died when I was pretty young & I have always wished I could have spent more time with him. On more than one occasion my father has introduced me to an old timer in his home town that will shake my hand & tell me something like "your grand-dad was the best man I ever knew", "Howard was the most honest man I've ever known" and "there's nothing he wouldn't do for someone that really needed it". I hear all these glowing descriptions of him & while I feel like I just barely got to know him it has always been a source of pride for me. I feel like he & my dad are the measuring sticks I'm compared to & I've got big shoes to fill because in someplaces there is a certain amount of respect associated with just my last name. I say all that to explain that I have very few memories of him & there are only 4 items that I associate with him, I hope to keep them all & hope that I'm able explain to my son one day why they're significant. If he'd passed 20 guns down to me and I'd been able to go fishing with him a few times as a young man I might feel less sentimental.
