I've heard some stories of people finding BAR's in their closet and all that, I'm sure 1% of it is true but I've heard too many "BAR in the attic" stories that I think people just don't know what they're seeing or are just telling a tall tale....the story also has evolved into the "M60 in the attic" as if Vietnam Vets were just bringing home M60's........there's as much chance of me making it off Ft. Drum with a 240B as there is hell freezing over.......of course this is a different time and they don't let us leave anywhere with so much as a live round, let alone a stolen machine gun...but back in WWII I imagine there was all kinds of stuff floating around and with millions of pistols and rifles and millions of serviceman moving around from Europe and the Pacific and back it could be easy to see some stuff slipping through the cracks....a BAR written off as "lost" "damaged" or "stolen" and with so much else going on no one probably looked too deep into it. I know a guy in the army reserves who had his M16A2 stolen while at Ft. Polk doing training, so somewhere a civilian has his hands on a US Govt. property M16.......also, yes believe it or not, weapons do really get lost overseas in Iraq.....a guy in my platoon had his M4 fall out of the turret of an MRAP and didn't realize it, and 4 days later after numerous threats and demands to an entire village an Iraqi in this village came up with a muddy, dirty M4. I'm sure there have been similiar instances where the weapon was not found. Just to illustrate that weapons do get lost and change hands sometimes. A few pistols even manage to make it home, although it's VERY difficult. I was tempted to try a few times with some assorted Czech .32 auto pistols and some other stuff like Tokarevs and old Berettas but the risk wouldn't be worth it for these pistols. I think it's absurd they don't let us take trophies like they used to, we can carry automatic rifles and risk getting blown up but I can't send home a Makarov that I found in a weapons cache Better to blow up a pile of weapons than let a soldier take home a pistol as a trophy

I can see scores of war trophy pistols and rifles like K98's, P38's and even a few 1911A1's being taken home by vets during a time when things were much "looser" with stuff like that. A GI gets his hands on a .45, it may have just been given to him at the field level, he may have been an AG or something and then he just holds on to it after he gets back to the states. But I don't think it would be easy to just stuff a BAR in a duffel bag, the army would kind know if stuff like that went missing. If it did happen then it would be a pretty slick GI to make it home with an MG42 much less USGI property.