Category Archive 'AK-47'
23 Sep 2017
The NYT reported Tuesday:
A towering monument to Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47, the Soviet rifle that has become the world’s most widespread assault weapon, was unveiled on Tuesday in the middle of one of central Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares.
The ceremony took place to the sounds of Russian military folk music, the Soviet anthem, Orthodox prayers and words about how his creation had ensured Russia’s safety and peace in the world.
The bronze statue depicts General Kalashnikov, who died in 2013 at age 94, looking into the distance and cradling one of his automatics in his arms “like a violin,†according to Russian state television. The statue is about 16 feet tall, and on a pedestal about 13 feet tall.
Naturally, the Times bed-wetters felt compelled to add this little jibe:
“The ceremony contained no mention of the untold millions of people who have been killed or maimed by the weapon since its creation in 1947.”
RTWT
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Mikhail Kalashnikov’s memorial did apparently have a glitch, however.
The Guardian:
Workers have removed part of a new monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the Soviet Union’s AK-47 assault rifle, after eagle-eyed Russians noticed that it mistakenly depicted a German second world war weapon.
The monument to the creator of one of Russia’s best known export brands was unveiled in central Moscow three days ago to much fanfare.
A metal bas-relief behind a statue of Kalashnikov depicts the AK-47 and other weapons all supposedly designed by the engineer, who died in 2013.
But embarrassed sculptor Salavat Shcherbakov had to admit that among them was the Sturmgewehr 44 (StG 44) assault rifle used by Nazi troops.
“We will rectify this,†Shcherbakov said in comments broadcast by state-run Rossiya 24 channel. “It looks like this [mistake] sneaked in from the internet.â€
By Friday evening a square hole gaped where the German rifle had been depicted in the bas-relief.
RTWT
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The US Government ought to put up a slightly larger statue of John Moses Browning.
14 Jun 2017
(click on image for larger version)
06 Apr 2016
I don’t know much about these things, but I’m told this Kalashnikov is a Type 56. The CEO of Underground Tactical reportedly took it away from a poacher somewhere unspecified in Africa. And, even in this condition, it still shoots!
Jon Wayne Taylor on Instagram was the original source.
The typical Gun Broker dealer would rate it as NRA Good, and say: “Has light patina.”
15 Mar 2016
This number sports no fewer than four lights, three optics, and four vertical front grips!
Gun collectors these days moan and groan all the time about Bubba-style American customizations of pre-WWII military longarms. Oh, those replaced stocks, the receivers drilled for scope mounts, the final horror of white plastic spacers on the pistol grip cap and buttplate!
Forgotten Weapons today did a very amusing post discussing what Ahab the Arab can do in the way of customizing his trusty AK-47.
05 Feb 2016
All this AK needs is a pair of fuzzy dice…
07 Dec 2015
It isn’t easy making a case in favor of the second (the Japanese Arisaka comes in first) least desirable military rifle from the first half of the last century, but Endo-Mike does a great job here.
AR-15: You can melt it with a magnifying glass.
AK-47: Under a magnifying glass, you can see the ingrained dirt.
Mosin-Nagant: Under a magnifying glass, you can see the soaked-in BLOOD. …
AR15: Built with custom parts, nice trigger, all the bells and whistles $1500+
AK47: Modified with aftermarket and 1,000 rounds of ammo not even $1500
Mosin-Nagant: Stock, with 1,000 rounds maybe $300, meaning you get $1200 to spend on more beer …
AR15: Lots of fancy optics available
AK47: You can bolt some stuff to the side
Mosin-Nagant: Who cares about optics when the barrel is long enough to smack the enemy over the head without even leaving your foxhole. …
AR15: Invented 50 years ago by a consummate engineer
AK47: Invented 60 years ago by wounded tank sergeant
Mosin-Nagant: Invented 117 years ago by two drunks on a budget.
Read the whole thing. It’s long, but funny.
10 Jun 2013
Reputedly: “106-year-old Armenian woman sitting in front of her home guarding it with an AK-47 in the village of Degh, near the border of Azerbaijan.” But the photo is several years old, is all over the web, and appears on a number of Russian-language motivation posters. I was not able to find a reliable source or attribution.
26 May 2013
Metrosexual Bryan Schatz, reporting for the red rag Mother Jones, impersonated a normal male American and attended a “build party.”
Build parties seem to be a California phenomenon (the only ones I can find reference to were advertized on the Calguns.net forum), in which people get together, in accordance with currently existing federal gun regulations, to complete personally the lower receiver (which is the element of modern semi-automatic rifles that is legally regarded as constituting the firearm as which is consequently the only part whose sale and transfer is regulated) and then assemble the complete AK or AR rifle using a parts kit.
A build party offers the opportunity to legally manufacture your own contemporary military-style semi-automatic-only rifle, which since you made it for your own use, has no serial number and need not be registered. Beyond that, a build party saves the prospective gun-owner at least a portion of the cost of a fully-assembled semi-automatic contemporary military-style rifle.
Schatz is your typical liberal pussy, who is intentionally milking for journalistic purposes all the shock and awe of actually handling, and even assembling, mechanical instruments that look war-like and can go boom! when you pull the trigger. These sorts of people always bask in the transgressive romance and machismo of it all.
Many kits come from stockpiles in former war zones. “I can guarantee you this one has bodies on it,” says one of the hosts as I peer down the barrel of a Yugo RPK. It’s lined with grit and soot. My host says the AK I’m building is an Egyptian “Maadi” that came to the United States via Croatia, likely having been shipped there during the Yugoslav wars. He tells me some wooden stocks come with tally marks notched in them.
But never for very long. Schatz quickly moves on to worrying about the absence of Big Brother monitoring all this. Since these build party guns are neither numbered nor registered, his liberal heart begins leaping with terror over the fact that they are “not traceable.”
Liberal efforts at gun control always begin with the fundamentally bogus idea that finding the perpetrator of a crime of violence is always, or even often, a question of identifying the actual weapon used or tracing its chain of ownership. In reality, the identity of the culprit is almost always determined from witnesses, motives and opportunity, or by the criminal’s subsequent actions, rather than by tracing ownership of the weapon.
Countless millions of unregistered guns, guns going back to the Beretta-manufactured wheel-lock that John Alden brought over on the Mayflower, are already out there. There are lots of Americans just as handy as the Afghan bazaar craftsmen who can make an entire AK-47 with hand tools in mud shack, and we are presently entering the age in which you can print out that lower receiver (or an entire gun) with a 3-D printer. The Canadians tried registering all of their guns, spent billions on the project, and finally concluded that gun registration, after more than a decade had never actually played any role in solving any crime.
The truth of the matter is that gun registration, keeping track of serial numbers and ownership, is not about solving crimes at all. It is really just a way of injecting friction and cost and potential legal jeopardy into firearms transfers and owndership, with the end goal being confiscation.
In the end, Schatz proves his liberal bona fides, naturally, by deliberately destroying the AK he had fun assembling and shooting. It would be wrong to own such a thing. After all, it might climb out of your closet and go on a killing spree.
I never knew that rational people actually read Mother Jones, but Schatz’s commenters really kicked Schatz’s nonsense around the block. The comments are a lot better than the article.
Build parties sound mildly intriguing, and I have actually begun to see the point of owning so-called “assault weapons.” That lower receiver is just the platform to which you can attach an extraordinary variety of optional barrels, stocks, and accessories, making it, in essence, a Swiss Army Knife-style shooting platform. Still, even with a build party, the cost of upper receivers and barrels, stocks, and accessories inevitably add up. Start with a few hundred for the lower receiver and the party, and add in the rest, and that black rifle plinking toy is always going to cost pretty close to a thou. It can easily cost more.
You can buy some awfully nice classic old-fashioned rifles for that kind of money. Who’d want a plastic semi-auto plinker, when for the same kind of money you could buy, for instance, a pre-WWI classic sporter? The way I figure it, if we ever get into a state of civil unrest in which one really seriously needs an AR, I can always just shoot some representative of the tyrannical government and take his, which will have full-auto too.
14 Oct 2010
Popular Mechanics talks to C.J. Chivers, author of , who shares some interesting insights on the infamous AK-47 assault rifle.
It was not really the sole invention of peasant genius Mikhail Kalashnikov, and the Communist world’s ability to distribute examples by the millions was not so much the result of the weapon’s simplicity and cheapness of manufacture as a serendipitous (from their point of view) result of command economies.
Rival teams were given a set of specification and deadlines, and through a series of stages the teams presented prototypes, and contest supervisors winnowed the field. Stalin liked these contests. They created urgency and a strong sense of priorities, and they helped speed along development. This was also a system without patents or even firm notions of intellectual property, at least as we know them in the West. So design convergence was part of the process—the teams and the judges, as time passed, could mix and match features from different submissions. Think of a game of Mr. Potato Head. Now imagine a similar game, in which many different elements and features of an automatic rifle are available to you, and more are available at each cycle, and you can gradually pluck the best features and assemble them into a new whole. …
One common misperception is that the AK-47 is reliable and effective, therefore it is abundant. This is not really the case. The weapon’s superabundance, its near ubiquity, is related less to its performance than to the facts of its manufacture. Once it was designated a standard Eastern Bloc arm, it was assembled and stockpiled in planned economies whether anyone paid for or wanted the rifles or not. This led to an uncountable accumulation of the weapons. And once the weapons existed, they moved. Had the weapon not been hooked up to the unending output of the planned economy, it would have been a much less significant device. If it had been invented in Liechtenstein, you might have never even heard of it. …
For the Soviet Union, the AK-47 is arguably the most apt physical symbol of the Soviet period and what it left behind. It was the Kremlin’s most successful product, even the nation’s flagship brand, and it came into existence through distinct Soviet behaviors and traits. But it was a breakout weapon, and its fuller meaning and deeper legacy lie in its effects on security and war. It leveled the battlefield in many ways and changed the way wars are fought, prompting a host of reactions and shifts in fighting styles and risks. Its effects will be with us for many more decades, probably for the rest of this century, at least. This is perhaps its real legacy—as the fighting tool like no other, which we will confront, and often suffer from, for the rest of our lives.
The correct translation of sturmgewehr, the felicitous term coined by Adolph Hitler himself, is really “assault weapon.” It is a “storm rifle” in the sense of a rifle desiged for storming enemy positions, not a weapon as formidable as bad weather.
Hitler’s coinage was a typically exaggeratedly romantic misnomer. The Sturmgewehr 42 was designed to be a compromise mixed-use weapon combining the some of the long range accuracy of the infantry rifle along with the firepower of the submachinegun. In WWII, the German Army found the role of infantry had changed. Instead of dominating the battlefield and exchanging fire with other masses of infantry, infantry principally spent its time accompanying and protecting tanks from being disabled or eliminated by other infantry. Most exchanges of fire were at close range where high rates of fire would be desirable, but simply taking away all the Mausers and giving every infantryman a Maschinenpistole-40 “Schmeisser” firing 9mm Parabellum cartridges did not seem a completely satisfactory idea either.
Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.
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