[ATE] Firearms, TL, Cost, and explanations for availability

[phayman53]

I really love the ATE line so far (I have ATE 1 and 2), but I have a question about the new way equipment costs are handled as it relates to firearms and tech levels and how you would justify RAW to your players.

To explain: items that are above TL4 cost a multiple of their base value determined by how many TL they are above TL4. The (sensible) justification for this is that post-apocalyptic tribes/communities/organizations would stabilize at about TL4 in their ability to produce technological goods--at least on a widespread scale. My problem with this really only comes with firearms. It seems to me that there is a lot of difference between TL4 through early TL5 firearms--which use black powder and (mostly) caseless loading methods--and late TL5-TL8 firearms--which use jacketed bullets, smokeless powder, and metal cartridges. The former tend have much looser tolerances and have bullets and powder that can be made using widely available ingredients. The latter seem to require more advanced manufacturing techniques, ingredients, and materials. Because of this, I can see why newly made TL4-early TL5 firearms would start to be made and widely available as things stabilize after the apocalypse, but it is harder for me to see why late TL5 (using cased rounds) and TL6 era firearms should get a significantly smaller cost multiplier (and therefore be more common) than TL7 and 8 firearms. TL7-8 firearms sometimes have more advanced materials (and this is usually in the stock and its accessories, especially at TL8) and benefited from experience in weapon design, but are not usually fundamentally more difficult to make than TL6 firearms with the same action types (bolt, lever, semi-automatic, or fully-automatic). So, if new firearms are being made by gunsmiths, a semi-automatic M-14 is not much harder to make than an M1 Garand (both are steel with wood stocks and use gas piston driven actions), so why should the TL6 to TL7 difference make such a huge difference in cost? Furthermore, TL7-8 firearms exist in much greater numbers immediately pre-apocalypse than TL6 and late TL5 firearms (at least using a TL8 apocalypse for a society like ours), so many more would have survived the apocalypse, making the cost less comparably prohibitive. [EDIT: One obvious example of this: would it really be easier to find, and therefore less expensive to own, an M1 Garand than an AK-47? The costs by ATE rules is $2040 for the Garand and $3600 for the AK-47.]

My question is, how do you explain why it is easier to afford a WWII era semi-automatic than a Vietnam era semi-automatic? Or a TL5 lever action than a TL6 bolt action (which really cannot be that much harder to make)? I know it is post-apocalyptic fiction and therefore should not be held under a realism microscope, but I am interested in how you would explain it to a player who claims that it might be easier to find a bolt action or semi-automatic rifle (TL6-8) than a lever action rifle (TL5, less popular after TL6) or .41 cal derringer (not overly common IRL, but standard equipment on the Raider template in ATE2).