Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "A Sneaky Swiss Sniper for Israel: the ZK-31" video.

  1. I'm pretty sure the legal issue for Switzerland wasn't specifically that it was Israel, but that Israel was fighting a war. Swiss law to this day forbids selling weapons to combatant nations. Nicaragua wasn't fighting any wars in 1949, so it was legal to sell them rifles. And as for scrubbing the markings? I would imagine that's not so much out of any silly attempt to hide that it's a Swiss rifle, but so that it'd be harder to identify who smuggled the rifle.
    45
  2.  @madkoala2130  It was. K98k Mausers and 7.92x57 became the standard rifle and cartridge once the war was won, simply because it's what Israel had the most of. When the IDF adopted the FAL in 1955, 7.62x51 became the standard caliber, and there were so many Mausers still in use (and it'd take a while to make enough FALs and Uzis to arm everybody) that they did a mass rebarreling of them to 7.62.
    11
  3. Apparently, a few surplus K31s were converted by SIG to .308 for use in international shooting competitions. I'm sure it's been done from time to time otherwise, both in Switzerland and the United States. For any such American conversions, unless you can be sure it was done by a competent gunsmith I'd say pass.
    3
  4. This was a time when Israel wasn't in a position to be picky. They were using everything that went bang.
    1