*choke* $1500??!!

Like many of living the ‘firearms enthusiast lifestyle’, I tend to make occasional circuits of pawn shops on the off chance of scoring a deal.  I don’t know about the pawn brokers where you live, but around H-town (especially if the store is part of a chain) the standard pricing for used guns is to take the MSRP of the gun were it new and then add about 15-20%.  It’s obvious that those prices are intended for customers outside the ‘F.E.L.’ and therefore ignorant of market value and pricing.  It’s not unexpected to see Glocks that look like they’ve been bouncing around in the bed of a pickup for a year or two with a tag asking $650, but even so when I saw this:

S&W M&P 15-22 in O.D. green with very optimistic pricing.

…I actually did a double take.  When I pointed out, to a manager, that it was priced three times what a new one sells for, his response was, “I didn’t price that.”  The M&P 15-22 is not a rare gun; even during the height of the Great Gun Panic of 2013 with folks buying $250 bricks of .22 and waiting hours to get into gun shows I doubt that gun would sell at that price.

Unless maybe that VFG is hand carved from fossilized dinosaur bone…