A grim reminder for shipping guns

[Richard Flanders]

A friend here in Fairbanks just sent me this. He's a rabid Mauser collector. Here is his experience with one he received via UPS recently. Below is a part of his email - the part that is polite enough to include here! - that came with the images. He's not a happy camper. To break this stock like this would have required one hell of a drop.

"The attached pics are of a near-perfect, all-matching M1893
Uruguayan Mauser that I bought back in November and delayed shipping
up here until after the Christmas madness.

The rifle was packed in a thick-walled double box, wrapped in over
24 feet of bubble wrap and inside that was a sock over the rifle.
End-caps were padded with both bubble wrap and thick spongy packing paper.

Despite the packing, it is pretty clear to me that they slam-dunked
the box so that the butt-end of the Mauser hit the ground with enough
force to shear the stock cleanly, just aft of the wrist. This rifle
survived 130 years of life but got destroyed by some pin-head
throwing it around like a javelin."