![1914 german mauser rifle 1914 german mauser rifle](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Gewehr_98_noBG.jpg)
The famous Swiss annual Waffen Digest recently (1992 edition) carried a couple of unusual announcements: One was descriptive of a “new” product called Mauser Jagdrepetierer Modell 98, a rather familiar model introduced by the mother firm, Mauser-Werke, Oberndorf-am-Neckar, absent from the thriving market for their most famous product for 46 years. Many of the countries which used the 98 as a military rifle produced and most still produce the action as a hunting piece. The Finnish Sakos and the Swedish Carl Gustaf and Husqvarna are all 98-type actions. French, Dutch, British and Italian sporting rifles and actions have been made in standard, miniature and magnum lengths. Handmade Model 98s in calibers up to 50 Browning are still being turned out by builders like Fred Wells of Prescott, Arizona. FN-built Peruvian M1946 short rifle accepting five rounds in a stripper clip of the 30-06 for which these post-WWII rifles were chambered.Īnd that’s just the military rifles. (Yes, the Mauser firm was paid at least $400,000 in royalties until at least 1914.) There were also the U.S/British P17/P14 “Enfields” and the late French MAS derivatives in this category. The Belgians, Poles, Austrians, Czechs, Iranians, Yugoslavs, Turks, Spaniards, Argentines, Brazilians, Mexicans and others produced military M98s in quantity others produced near-copies and “improvements” for military use like the U.S. The Chinese and Japanese produced Model 98 rifles and copies in vast quantities, both for themselves and for client states. It’s probably not that close, but no one knows for sure. Only the Russian AK-47 design comes anywhere close to the production figures of the Model 98. It’s hard to come up with a firmer figure, for the rifle was produced in twenty or more countries, most of which used it as a military rifle, and another large group of nations produced clones, copies and ripoffs of the original, often in quantities so vast they couldn’t give a production figure if they wanted, and they don’t want. About the closest estimate one can acquire of the quantities of the Mauser Model 98 produced thus far is somewhere between 91 million and 125 million. But when a gun is nearing its hundredth birthday, hasn’t been out of production for much longer than somebody’s coffeebreak, and is still a favorite of hunters and precision shooters everywhere, calling it great may be an understatement. Greatness in firearms is a pretty subjective judgement.