45

M1911A1 .45 Automatic

This caught my eye, I mean it sounds like a really good deal. But this is an old ad, surely from the days before Nixon canceled the gold standard. In those days an ounce of gold was $35, so this gun cost almost two ounces of gold. Now-a-days, a 45 will set you back $1,000, which sounds like a chunk of change until you realize that gold is now $2400, which means this gun would cost less than half an ounce of gold. So in terms of our rapidly devaluing paper money, a 45 costs like 20 times as much as it did in the bad old days. However, in terms of real money, a 45 costs a quarter of what they used to cost.