Baseball Cards and Modern Firearms

[huntsman]

A gun is worth what someone will pay for it.

I took a kel-tec P-11 to a LGS and thinking $100. For $273. Gun was doable, nope they said we can’t sell them because nobody wants it regardless of cost.

 

[Flintshooter]

Good catch...however Western Auto, Sears, Wards, Ted Williams on and on....are starting to go up in value....again it goes back to what was seen as disposable, not as "hot" as their name branded counterparts.....they are getting interest in the community.

I have several Western Auto branded....well anything, from guns to desk fans....being from KC, it just always hit me as kinda cool, and I do remember being there down town and western auto having all kinds of cool stuff.

Another thing with off brands like JC Higgins, Ted Williams, Bluegrass, Western Auto, and countless others is that some well known company actually made the gun and stamped it with a different name. I’ve never bothered to look, but I’m sure that a little digging can tell if that off brand gun with the nice price tag because of the name is actually a Winchester (who sold an unbelievable amount of things they didn’t make but carried their name), Remington, Mossburg, H&R etc. If a book hasn’t been written on the subject, it could be.

 

[bannockburn]

I think the biggest thing today is that our kids are not into guns, knives, hunting, fishing, camping, vintage cars, or most collectibles the same way we were (Baby Boomers that is). Of our 5 kids, along with their 5 spouses, only half of them own just one gun and that's primarily for self defense. No desire to collect guns, compete with them, or use them for sport or hunting. I still know of a few gun collectors but even that number has gone down considerably over the last few years. And it's been 8 or 9 years since I went to a gun show (use to go to one every month). Likewise I don't know of anybody still collecting sports memorabilia like baseball cards and all of the card shops have long since vanished, just like the big shopping malls of the '70s and '80s.

My one son for instance has a nice paying job and recently bought a house but his two great passions in life are playing video games and traveling to other countries. He has no interest in collecting anything, drives a 9 year old car, and is somewhat reluctant to accept any of my guns. Most of the other kids prefer to travel, go on cruises, or spend their money on entertainment and going out to dinner. As far as I know none of them collect anything.

It's just that over the long haul our "free time" pursuits, like hobbies and collecting, change and the generation after ours no longer share those same interests as we did.

 

[reddog81]

Depends....generally $500......and a card you paid $500 for 15 years ago is likely to be worth many times that.....same goes with hot wheels or anything else.

But you need to know where the people that are interested in what you are selling are going to be.

Take that SR1911 to a card show and let me know what you get......if you get in.

You're kidding right? I collected cards back in the late 80's early 90's and had quite a collection. I had a co-worker who has rooms full of cards look through all my "valuable" cards and he offered $20 for 1 of them. The rest of the lot was worth right around $100 to $200 he said. These were probably worth around $1,000-$2,000 based on the Beckett value 15 to 20 years ago. There's plenty of articles out there on this exact subject... The card manufacturers pumped out millions of these little pieces of paper and now their worth about the price of the paper they're printed on. If you want to buy mine at a multiple of what they were worth 15 years ago I'll throw in a free steak dinner.

I wouldn't know anything about carrying a gun into a card show as I haven't been in decades...

 

[bersaguy]

Lots of good discussion for a topic that, admittedly, was a bit of hyperbole. I started hunting as a kid with my dad, but I was in my mid 20's before I purchased my first firearm. I had a 16ga and a 22, but had not bought my own. Now, nearly 20 years ago, many of the guns I would see for sale at gun shows used, were offered lower than what you could buy them for new, but not by a huge amount. If buying from a private seller you'd save sales tax, transfer, and a bit on top of that, but not anything like 50%. Cheapest I can find a new SR1911 online for is about $700. I would have taken $500 that day. But with the best offer coming from a private buyer at $350 got me to thinking...maybe guns just don't hold their value like they used to. And, frankly they probably don't, but like has been said, at least they have utility at any price, considering they are of decent quality to begin with. And, probably just fine as is...I dont collect for the sake of collecting, or hoping to turn a profit...I just like shooting, creating empty brass that i get to load back up.

 

[gunlaw]

If I understand the post correctly it seems to be a comparison between baseball cards and firearms collecting. In the 80’s card collecting was a fad. Some old cards sold at auction for big money and a lot of people thought if they bought and preserved cards they would someday be very valuable. About a million people had the same idea. Therefore the demand crashed.
Gun collecting is much different. Certain guns from particular manufacturers hold or rise in value based on demand. For example there were over 6,000,000 M1 garands made. 10,000,000 people want them. Colt Pythons are off the charts because of demand. Clark’s,Les Baer,Ed Brown and the like will hold or increase in value because they will be made for a limited time. The mass produced guns will become 21st century Iver Johnson’s.

 

[PWC]

I'm 75 and when I go onto Cracker Barrel, I see old tools...many I have used, most I know. Do we "collect" for the pleasure or the utility it gives us now, or are we like "day traders" with our retirement funds.

As stated above, I think "collecting", at least as we are discussing here is generational. I have no idea if people now are interested in what we were/are.

 

[ford8nr]

Baseball cards ?
Lets talk about Beer Can collecting of the 1970's

 

[Elkins45]

A baseball card only has market value in normal economic times. In a depression or economic collapse you might not be able to find someone with enough disposable income to spend it on cards, art, porcelain, beanie babies, etc. These are things people want, not things people need. In contrast, firearms will likely have much more of a market because they will always have some value as a useful object. Nobody needs a baseball card, but sometimes people really need a gun.

"Collectables" are much more difficult to sell in hard times because the potential market shrinks so much. Or, to put it in the form of a joke told by prepper types: "Cool Rolex, bro. I'll give you this chicken for it."

 

[huntsman]

^ while I agree about the cards most preppers see value in “hard assets”.

after the crash the monied people where chasing hard assets to get out of investments and cash, of which firearms were a part of, but only specific ones.

I believe gun guys want to see collectibility in all their guns and while almost all have a SD use not all are worthy of keeping for sale or exchange in the future.

 

[Rule3]

Just think if you had "collected Colt Pythons" or SW Registered Magnums

How much do some people pay for wood grips "harvested" from old revolvers.

I hope my kids Beenie Babies go up in value, I need something to retire on! Should have collected Barbie Dolls

 

[PWC]

Now, what are all those little gold bars, chains or coins worth when the SHTF? One for a loaf of bread? How do you make change? A gun, now that has utility, if you have ammo.

 

[fpgt72]

You're kidding right? I collected cards back in the late 80's early 90's and had quite a collection. I had a co-worker who has rooms full of cards look through all my "valuable" cards and he offered $20 for 1 of them. The rest of the lot was worth right around $100 to $200 he said. These were probably worth around $1,000-$2,000 based on the Beckett value 15 to 20 years ago. There's plenty of articles out there on this exact subject... The card manufacturers pumped out millions of these little pieces of paper and now their worth about the price of the paper they're printed on. If you want to buy mine at a multiple of what they were worth 15 years ago I'll throw in a free steak dinner.

I wouldn't know anything about carrying a gun into a card show as I haven't been in decades...

Wrong cards.

 

[commygun]

"Base quality of manufacture helps a gun retain value and appreciate when it's older."

Hard to overstate when you're talking about firearms. Sure, there are exceptions like your Guide Lamp Liberator or whatever, but in my personal experience if it wasn't quality to begin with, age and rarity are going to do little to enhance value in most (not all) cases.

Interesting topic, by the way. We have a lot of members with some very desirable older firearms. It'd be great to hear their experiences.

 

[Slamfire]

Guns will loose most of their value if the Government starts confiscating them. Hard to say how the the value of the ones we might be allowed to keep will react. Might go up. But not if their owners are taken out to the street and shot. Which could happen in some dystopic future.

The collectable market is very tough to predict. Didn't Yogi Berra say "It is very hard to predict, especially the future?"

When baseball cards hit a peak in the 1980's, I knew a young lady who is still a sports fanatic who bought cases of unsealed baseball cards. The last I talked to her about this, she had lost money on the whole adventure. The trash man was happy.

Buy cryptocurrencies, at least you know they are based on nothing, and when you lose your money, you don't have paper trash to take out to the curve.

 

[bassjam]

Back to the OP...Twenty years from now, most guns made in the 2000s will still be considered "normal". Guns are like cars - they start with a retail value, lose value with wear and time, then recover value as they get much older.

Having said that, there are other factors. Base quality of manufacture helps a gun retain value and appreciate when it's older. A generic flintlock holster pistol from 1800 is worth some money, but a proper dueling pistol from a name maker is worth much more. Scarcity counts, too. The Gen 1 Glocks are a good example.

I think the biggest thing today is that our kids are not into guns, knives, hunting, fishing, camping, vintage cars, or most collectibles the same way we were (Baby Boomers that is). Of our 5 kids, along with their 5 spouses, only half of them own just one gun and that's primarily for self defense. No desire to collect guns, compete with them, or use them for sport or hunting. I still know of a few gun collectors but even that number has gone down considerably over the last few years. And it's been 8 or 9 years since I went to a gun show (use to go to one every month). Likewise I don't know of anybody still collecting sports memorabilia like baseball cards and all of the card shops have long since vanished, just like the big shopping malls of the '70s and '80s.

My one son for instance has a nice paying job and recently bought a house but his two great passions in life are playing video games and traveling to other countries. He has no interest in collecting anything, drives a 9 year old car, and is somewhat reluctant to accept any of my guns. Most of the other kids prefer to travel, go on cruises, or spend their money on entertainment and going out to dinner. As far as I know none of them collect anything.

It's just that over the long haul our "free time" pursuits, like hobbies and collecting, change and the generation after ours no longer share those same interests as we did.

This is largely dependent on your individual circle of friends and family. I'm a millennial, and my "boomer" father and uncles weren't much into hunting and guns. They each had one or two guns that were given to them by their father, but they sat in a closet unused for decades until they noticed me and my brother's interest in firearms, at which point they gave the to us. It's the same with a lot of my friends, it seems most of their boomer parents had an old .22 and a shotgun from their childhood that was collecting dust that might get used every couple years to go on a rabbit hunt, but that's about it. On the flip side most of my millennial aged friends have become what are now called "gun super-owners" with guns numbering from the low to even upper double digits.

 

[MistWolf]

Let politicians call for ban on baseball cards and watch what happens.

 

[bannockburn]

bassjam

Just about everyone I knew or worked with (and were around the same age as I was), were into guns, either for collecting, target shooting, or hunting. My father had no interest in guns (as were most of his friends), after he came home from WWII so my brothers and I were pretty much on our own to expand our horizons as far as guns were concerned. Nowadays I see our kids and their friends more interested in the latest electronic devices (I-Phones, tablets, audio/video components, etc.), more than anything else.

 

[.308 Norma]

And, frankly they probably don't, but like has been said, at least they have utility at any price, considering they are of decent quality to begin with.

The Hummel figurines my wife collects have “utility” value. She collects them, and they in turn collect dust in the curio cabinet.
But just to keep this gun related when it comes to "utility" value - hoping to make a rifle group a little better by putting some pressure on the barrel, I once placed a business card under the barrel at the forend tip of the stock. I don’t remember if it helped or not, but I could have just as easily used a baseball card if that was what I had.

 

[Elkins45]

And if you think that rookie mickey mantel card is only good for leveling a table leg then you are clueless....or that 1966 barbie is a $.25 garage sale item....both have very real value.

This is true in “normal” economic times, but in a severe recession or depression you won’t be able to find very many people who have disposable income to spend on these kind of luxury goods. In the circumstance where you have 10 buyers competing for one item then the seller profits nicely. In the reverse circumstance where 10 people ‘invested’ in a Barbie but only one person has the money to buy one, those 10 ‘investors’ are going to be in a race to see which one is willing to sell for the least. The most desperate one gets the cash and the other nine are left playing with their unsalable dolls.

This isn’t some revolutionary new economic theory; it’s fairly well known. Understanding this is key to understanding the difference between collecting and investing. In some cases a collection can be an investment, but that’s usually only the case in strong economic times. In the case of guns vs dolls, cards, etc. most guns will always retain some useful fraction of their salability purely as market commodities. Unless you did something extraordinarily dumb your gun collection is never going to be worth 10% of what you paid for it, assuming we’re talking about functioning cartridge firearms. If you collect $50k historical flintlock pieces then you may have a hard time finding a buyer unless the economy is absolutely roaring.

Of course in the grand scheme of things all value is relative. 30 years ago when I lived alone and even farther out in the boonies than now there was a knock on my door after dark. It was a guy who had been running his coon hounds on a neighboring property and one was missing. In the course of our brief conversation he mentioned that he had paid $3000 for this particular dog. The thought that immediately leaped into my mind was that if I owned a $3000 dog I would be searching hard for someone in the market for a $3000 dog.

 

[huntsman]

The Hummel figurines my wife collects have “utility” value. She collects them, and they in turn collect dust in the curio cabinet.
But just to keep this gun related when it comes to "utility" value - hoping to make a rifle group a little better by putting some pressure on the barrel, I once placed a business card under the barrel at the forend tip of the stock. I don’t remember if it helped or not, but I could have just as easily used a baseball card if that was what I had.

When I was a boy we’d shoot our plastic soldiers with BB guns, great fun.

Hummels + .22lr, like being a boy again

 

[Outlaw75]

I wouldn't expect today's guns to be that collectable in the future. There are too many out there now and rarity is one of the things that drives collectability and value. Also, there's too much boutique stuff out there that isn't to everyone's taste. On of my other hobbies is electric guitars. The guitar boards are full of posts like this; too many boutique builds, too much guitar flipping and over modding have driven the used gear market into a hole. I don't see it coming back any time soon, if ever.

 

[ford8nr]

Big problem with the gun market is new guns have gotten too good and too inexpensive. Back in the day when a MOA rifle was a special thing there was a premium. That premium is mostly gone with today's accuracy and pricing. Things that have gone up in price due to scarcity (some mil surplus) have probably hit max pricing. How much would you pay for a Mosin.
Case in point I half hardily collected Win Model 12 shotguns. Pricing hit $350-400 probably 15-20 yrs ago but hasn't moved much past that. I just don't think the upcoming generations are gonna collect what I have.

 

[fpgt72]

I wouldn't expect today's guns to be that collectable in the future. There are too many out there now and rarity is one of the things that drives collectability and value. Also, there's too much boutique stuff out there that isn't to everyone's taste. On of my other hobbies is electric guitars. The guitar boards are full of posts like this; too many boutique builds, too much guitar flipping and over modding have driven the used gear market into a hole. I don't see it coming back any time soon, if ever.

Reminds you of a "relic" thread don't it.

 

[fpgt72]

Big problem with the gun market is new guns have gotten too good and too inexpensive. Back in the day when a MOA rifle was a special thing there was a premium. That premium is mostly gone with today's accuracy and pricing. Things that have gone up in price due to scarcity (some mil surplus) have probably hit max pricing. How much would you pay for a Mosin.
Case in point I half hardily collected Win Model 12 shotguns. Pricing hit $350-400 probably 15-20 yrs ago but hasn't moved much past that. I just don't think the upcoming generations are gonna collect what I have.

You, or anyone collects what interests them....does not matter one lick what the "field" is, if you ain't into it your heart is not going to be in it.....

I told the story of a lawyer friend that "collected" winchester lever guns.....I first met him in the mid 80's fell out of touch for a decade or two, then came across him at the Missouri valley show not long ago....still doing it, but more on the selling side then the buying side.....you can do that if you collected these things back when they are just an old gun as they where in the 80's.....now with media as it is places like youtube and the different gun "channels" on there he is of the idea that it is really driving interest and prices......Seems like he "invested" his money in a wise manner.....and when the market tanked several years ago I bet he did not blink twice.....most of his money was in his collection....now that he is knocking on the door at 70 he is starting to sell off.

He did his collection because he FELT that the winchester would be of value down the line, he loved the old lever rifles from the movies when he was growing up.....he shot much of his collection, but also had "wall hangers" as well....finding rimfire ammo for some of that stuff is just not possible.

Now is him collecting winchester rifles "smarter" then someone collecting 60's muscle cars.....just buying gold.....baseball cards.....toys.....and doG knows what else......as others have said it is the open market that decides its value.....and if we had kept going with a given party in power there is a very good chance the guns would all be worth $100 in some buy back program......Just because it is a gun does not mean it is going to hold its value....just ask the people in New Zealand.