There’s accumulating guns—and then there’s collecting. Collecting, say, Rugers or Smith & Wessons became a lot easier when you could peruse the buy/sell/trade board on a Ruger or Smith & Wesson fan site. Now, I will confess to the gun-collecting equivalent of “hunting over bait,” in that I spent many a year working behind the counters of gun shops, which is where people bring in guns to sell or trade. Someone nowadays might plug “Mauser, Siamese” into a search engine on an auction site, but it’s just not the same. This is the good, old-fashioned shoe-leather work that makes the “fair chase” style of gun collecting so much fun; checking the used counters at local shops and trawling the tables at the local gun show.