Earlier this year a reader from the Balkans told me that he had found an old rusted Yugoslavian M56 submachine gun and asked how he might repair it. I told him I was sure it was rusted beyond the point of ever functioning again and he would never get the bolt out of it.

It may shock some of you to know that I am not always right! Last week he emailed me to say that he had successfully cleaned the gun up. He did an impressive job as you can see below …

I have advised him to look into the legal ramifications of his find, and to turn it over to the authorities or destroy it is he cannot legally own it. It is almost never worth keeping an illegal gun, the penalties are just too high.

The Yugoslavian M56 submachine gun was in officially military service between 1956 and 1992, but saw action mainly after this period during the Yugoslav Wars that began in 1991 with the Slovenian Independence War and concluded in 1999 with the end of the Kosovo War. You can be sure there are many rusted Yugoslavian M56 submachine guns in and around the the former Yugoslavia, sitting at the bottom of rivers and buried in forest