Talk about being green with envy.....A coupla thoughts:
A. The owner of the vault room says he started collecting NFA in 1978.
Do you know how cheap MGs were back then? A lof of C&R guns sold for less than the price of the $200 transfer stamp -- Maxims, factory M2 Carbines, Reisings, and a
lot of 9mm subguns and foreign-design LMGs and HMGs.
This was largely because odd-caliber ammo (anything not chambered by Winchester in the Model 70) was expensive and difficult/impossible to find: Before FOPA '86, all ammo sales had to be FTF; mail order was illegal. Due to low demand, most FFLs only stocked commercial hunting ammo -- and buying in MG-size bulk at per-box prices was
expensive. A box of 9mm cost more than a box of .357 Mag.
1978 was an NFA collector's dream ... and an NFA shooter's nightmare.
B. There are dozens of substantial private MG collections out there -- som bigger than this, others smaller but still in the double digits on the number of MGs. There are Thompson and M16 collectors with 50 to 100 examples, for instance. All were built in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, when MGs were cheap.
So: there are between 100k and 177k transferable MGs in the U.S., including those still in LE inventories. Subtract out these large collections, plus the MGs owned by museums, military collectors and other hard-core keep-em-til-I-die owners, and you realize just
how few MGs ever reach the market.
No wonder prices are what they are.