>Having served, and having aquaintances that do to this day, at
>fairly respectable positions, there was, as I understand it, a full-on
>run of some 10 thousand pieces(which isn't enough for what was, then,
>ALL the people that would likely carry one, but at least a fairly
>respectable number).

OK, yeah, that's pretty substantial. Substantial enough that I'm surprised CZ didn't insist on getting paid for them up front, but then, that was presumably back when Czechoslovakia was still a Communist country, so the people who ran the company may not have had the firmest grasp of how that kind of thing is supposed to work. :) (Particularly since hard-currency transactions of that kind were often technically illegal in those countries, meaning the state-run industries engaging in them had to do all sorts of weird legal/financial maneuvering to get away with them. Zastava in Yugoslavia had a similar problem trying to sell cars in the West, occasionally leading to delirious levels of overproduction.)

>And then they weren't paid for, and so, of
>course, not delivered. Which means they went on the market, because
>reworking 10k guns was a bit excessive.

Heh, reminds me of a thing I saw (probably in a Forgotten Weapons video) about the huge glut of US-manufactured Mosin-Nagant rifles that flooded the market in the 1920s. They were made by various US companies under contract to the Russian government before and during WWI, and then the 1917 revolutions happened and the Communists wouldn't pay for them. (In this case it wasn't 10,000, it was boxcarloads of the damn things.) "Well, shit," said the US gun companies, who were the bailed out by the War Department, which bought all the guns but had absolutely no use for them, and so dumped them on the surplus market almost instantaneously. :)

As it turned out, the Red Army could really have used all those guns when Operation Barbarossa came along, and something like a third of the army had to wait around for the guy next to them to get killed so they could have his rifle, but hey. :)

>Personally, I would want it because it's apparently a good gun, more
>so than the average CZ 75, which is as I understand it a very good gun
>as is, if perhaps not to the level of GC claims(I've read them too.
>:)) and, hey, royal proof marks.

I don't have one myself, but they do seem to be very highly regarded. Mechanically they're basically a double-action Browning Hi-Power, and that's one of my favorite 9mms, so I'd probably like them too.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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