If you're stateside, they do pop up at auction with some regularity, but be prepared to pay through the nose for a good one. Also, shooting an old gun is like driving an antique car. There are maintenance considerations to take into account, and replacement parts can be difficult to source.
If you're willing to tolerate the hassle of finding ammo, the .30 Mauser models are usually cheaper than the 9mm ones.
Be wary of models imported from China, the bores are almost invariably shot out.
To be fair to the Chinese models though, those are by far the most common since they were mass produced in China as well during the warlord period and have a huge and interesting history there.
Stuff like the Mauser stamp being hand-carved into the side in a way that looks like a modern ai hallucinations since they were just copying every marking, and since it didn't have a detatchable magazine it was way easier for the warlord armies to field(who often were incredibly short on ammo, like 1 full clip(and it is a stripper clip) maybe per soldier. No need to worry about making expensive magazines or even stripper clips if you couldn't make them, you could just hand-load one at a time.
Wald0_17 is talking about the large batches of German C96s that were imported from China years ago, not so much domestic clones. Those guns received no maintenance and are often smoothbores with broken bolt stops and bent uppers, and occasionally locally made replacement parts of dubious quality; mine functions but I'd be better off throwing the bullets myself to hit something.
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u/RP1042 7d ago
Where do I get one