Originally Posted by
JRB
I was around 12 years old when my Dad and I discovered a .308 Garand during a gun show and I just fell in LOVE. My Dad, ever the haggler, dickered the price down a little bit, and so we took it home.
I was in LOVE with that rifle! We took it to the range, and I was only more and more in love with each shot. I put a bunch of surplus 7.62 NATO through it, enough that I'd annoyed my Dad with how much I was shooting.
Then the rifle jammed up on a really funny looking piece of brass, looked like a blown-out straightwall casing.
Turns out that Garand was one of the old US Navy conversions that used a chamber insert to convert it from .30-06 to 7.62, and the chamber insert got ejected with another piece of brass.
Dad ended up taking it back to the FFL he got it from, which is a stand-up operation and my Dad had been a customer for decades, so they had no issue taking it back and giving him a refund.
But somehow I'm still heartbroken that we didn't fix it somehow, and I still lust for a Garand of my own.