Another thread got me thinking.  Interarms and others imported literaly millions of bolt action rifles in the 50's and 60's.  Most of these were Springfields, Carcanos, various Mausers and Enfields.  You see the recently imported ones everywhere but what happened to all the old ones?  You almost never see them.

Whenever a bunch of inexpensive surplus rifles arrives on the market lots of people buy them because of the low price.

Most of those people aren't really that interested in old mil-surps, so they end up re-selling them at gun shows, through classified  ads, on the net, to gun nut friends; etc.

Eventually after being passed from hand to hand for a while, a higher and higher percentage of these rifles end up in the hands of serious collectors.  Once they end up with those guys they're off the market until the estate sale if the collector has no gun nut kids.

Also, many of the first round of "cheap gun" buyers, who aren't really milsurp fans, try to "customize" these rifles, and they end up being so fucked up, butchered and "bubba-ized" that they are basically trash.  (To be fair, some disappear to become quality reworks).

Some of them are lost to simple neglect, left to rot away in a barn or garage.

Others end up used in crimes or confiscated from people with warrants, etc; and destroyed by the police.

Right now, all the recent imports are still in the "being passed hand to hand" stage.  

For whatever the reason, any type of common milsurp will be much rarer a few years down the road.Even the $39 Turk Mausers are around $100 now, because of the lessening supply.

There are plenty around still, but you can only buy them from private owners or as trade ins from stores.  You are just used to seeing things being sold en-masse from a wholesalers supply chain.  

The prior poster was correct though, many were 'sporterized'.  Some were well done, some were butchered.  In the 1960s, the in thing to do was to create a nice sporting rifle from a 'junk' surplus rifle.  Obviously, mausers were the main target.