Manufacturer silenced, but AK- 47 never will be
While the licensed producer of Kalashnikov’s assault rifle is near bankruptcy, a glut of imitations ensures that its gunfire will never cease
Those of us who have been on the wrong end of AK- 47 fire can take some comfort today that the Russian manufacturers of the world’s most popular assault rifle are on the verge of bankruptcy.
Russian and European media are reporting that the 200- year- old arms manufacturing company, Izhmash, is close to folding because the Russian Defence Ministry stopped buying the world’s most famous and effective assault rifle a year ago.
And while the rifle that is the personal weapon of choice of rebels and terrorists from Tora Bora to Timbuktu is made under licence in about 30 countries, there are many pirate manufacturers of the AK- 47, which has only nine moving parts.
The market is sated with cheap, but equally effective copies.
So less comforting for those of us who flinch at the distinctive sound of the AK- 47 in action, is the estimate by the World Bank that about 100 million copies of the world’s most reliable assault rifle invented by wounded tank driver Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947 are still in circulation.
Such is the glut of AK- 47s on the arms market that in places like Somalia, where they are a normal accessory for most men, they can be bought for less than $ 100.
Much to the pain of designer Kalashnikov, who is nearly 93 years old, his clever invention in the closing months of the Second World War has been called the real weapon of mass destruction of the last 60 years.
The Geneva- based group Small Arms Survey estimates that pistols, rifles and other personal weapons are responsible for 1,000 deaths a day world wide. How many of those involved AK- 47s is impossible to know. But in places where very many of these deaths occur, like the Philippines’ southern province of Mindanao, the insurgent hot spots of Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, the cities of Syria, and the drug lord fiefdoms of Mexico, the AK- 47 is the weapon of choice.
And for good reason. Mikhail Kalashnikov did his work well and produced a killing machine so simple and dependable it needs little training to use. With a supply of AK- 47s armies can be built using 12- year- old boys as foot soldiers, and they have.
The AK- 47 is not a pretty rifle. The breech, barrel and firing mechanism, which allows automatic fire of 600 bullets a minute, is brutally functional in design. And no effort at elegance was made in the design of the wooden stock and grips. In some copies, plastic is used instead of wood, which produces an even more evil- looking killing machine. But the AK- 47 has been the essential player in every war of liberation, civil war and international conflict since it first came into service with the Soviet military in 1949.
That has given the gun heroic status in many eyes. An outline of the AK- 47 is featured on the flag of Mozambique, acknowledgment of the part played by Kalashnikov’s invention in the war against Portuguese colonial rule and the 20- year civil war after the Portuguese left in 1975. Drawings of the gun also figure on the coats of arms of East Timor and Zimbabwe.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards use an outline of the AK- 47 as their logo, as does the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which is supplied and trained by the Iranians.
And when South African President Jacob Zuma sings the old anti- apartheid war song Bring Me My Machinegun, everyone knows which gun that is.
Mikhail Kalashnikov was a sergeant tank commander in 1941 when he was wounded in the Battle of Bryansk.
As he recuperated in hospital, Kalashnikov fretted over what he believed was a major problem — that the Soviet infantry with their bolt- action rifles were outgunned by their Nazi opponents, many armed with the first assault rifle, the Sturmgewehr 44.
Kalashnikov set about trying to design his own version of the assault rifle that would be relatively short, light, and capable of both automatic and single- shot fire. Great accuracy, a feature of the standard infantry rifle, was not so important.
Most infantry actions during the Second World War and since are at less than 400 metres. The AK- 47 is reasonably accurate up to that range, after which the bullets start tumbling.
Kalashnikov unashamedly put elements of the German Sturmgewehr 44 in his design, but he was also influenced by the American semi- automatic M1 Garand rifle and the Remington Model 8 rifle.
Kalashnikov’s baby was put through stringent reliability tests, including all the environments the Soviet Union could offer, from Arctic ice to desert sand storms, before it was adopted as the standard infantry weapon. It is now used by armies in more than 60 countries. The American military first came across the AK- 47 in the hands of the Viet Cong in Vietnam and quickly realized it was far superior to their unreliable M- 16s. Many Americans armed themselves with AK- 47s when they could as do, quietly, some American special forces units today.