Hey I'm not knocking the SKS at all. I've seen what they can do and it ain't pretty if you're on the wrong end. I knew a guy who went off the deep end on his uncle who had been stealing from him for years after the guy's dad died. He told my brother over and over that he would kill him someday. And wow did he ever. He shot up the trailer the guy lived in with his SKS. The place looked like Swiss cheese after he was done. Obviously I have no plans to shoot up anyone (perish the thought) but I do know what they can do. The 7.62 X 39 round is plenty effective. And My SKS is minute of man out to about 250-300 yards. It's never once failed that wasn't a result of bad ammo or a modification I made that was immediately fixed when I switched (the firing pin) back to the OEM part. I've run thousands of rounds of ammo through it and rarely cleaned it and it keeps right on ticking. It fires pretty much every time. Even with bad ammo I have about a 99.99% success rate. Considering I paid a whopping $100 for that rifle (I got in a little late compared to some) I'd say it was a good investment. I have thousands of rounds of ammo including a bunch of the old brass stuff. I've been buying ammo for that thing for a long time and I never seem to shoot up all I buy so it keeps piling up. I have 1000 round packs that have never been opened. Quite a few of them actually. It was so cheap I knew I'd never buy that much fun for that kind of money again. If you do a little work to a good SKS it will work very well. First off is a Kivaari trigger job which cuts group sizes in half pretty much. Protection against slam fires and now popped primers (a newer problem - my SKS is off to Murray's to get that problem fixed right now - it isn't really a rifle problem - it's an ammo problem - but a rifle mod can keep it from happening) are high on the list of things to do. I have about $200 in my Norinco altogether and it will hold it's own until the stock starts to smoke (I've seen that happen). It gets a bit hot to hang on to at that point.
