AK-47

"Corporal, stow this next to my seat. Better be prepared, never know when you might need an AK."

"Im proud of my invention, but Im sad that it is used by terrorists. … I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example a lawnmower."

"Then you have Che Guevara, possibly the coolest man ever to have walked the planet. Yes, his real name was Earnest, but he managed to make James Dean and Steve McQueen look like a couple of nancy boys. I loathed the mans politics but I loved the T-shirt. Even his beard worked because you knew it wasnt grown for any of the usual reasons- vanity, laziness or insecurity. It was grown because he lived in a wood and there was no water with which to shave. There are people today who spend a fortune trying to look good, but he managed to look better using only a beret and a boiler suit. I bet he had a lot of sex. I bet he also had an AK-47."

"Interestingly, however, it doesnt actually do anything especially interesting. You get a 30-round magazine that fires normal 7.62mmn ammunition at a rate of 600 bullets per minute. That gives you enough ammo for a three-second burst, which is about average. And theres nothing unusual about its range either. Reckon on 1,100 yards or so. In fact it even has a few design defects, like it weighs nearly 10 lbs. That doesnt sound like much but you trying carrying it around all day, in a jungle. Then there are the sights, which are too far forward on the barrel. But worse is the safety switch. To get it from safe to single shot you have to go through the fully automatic setting. And as you move it, it gives away its Russian origins, and your position, by going clack. So there you are, trying to ease off the safety for a nice, clean shot. But as you do so the target hears the mechanism and fires. You then fire back only to find youre in fully automatic mode and that youve missed. So why then, if its heavy, flawed and nothing special, has it been such a hit? Well, the simple answer is its simplicity. In a competition to find the least-complicated machine ever made, it would tie in first place with the mousetrap."

"Once, while I was working in Switzerland, a Hells Angel offered me a brand-new AK47, still in its greaseproof wrapping paper, for £300. He would have even thrown in a thousand rounds of ammunition for good measure. Here, he said, try it out. And so I did, firing at a railway sleeper maybe 60 yards away at the bottom of a quarry. The effect was astonishing. The bullets smashed the sleeper into two pieces that ended up ten feet from one another. So much, I remember thinking, for those Hollywood heroes who say ow when theyre hit."

"Kalashnikov had already distinguished himself by inventing a device that counted the shells a tank had fired and now, as he recuperated from his wounds, he set about designing something that could rival the Germans MP44. A hand-held sub-machinegun. Something that came to be known as the AK47. It wasnt actually read, as the name implies, until 1947, two years after Hitlers penis had been buried under the Kremlin, but that didnt stop it becoming by far and away the most successful gun in the whole of military history. No patent was ever taken out, which meant anyone with a foundry could set up shop and make one too. And they did. AKs were produced all around the world in such vast numbers that so far 70 million have been sold. And that in turn means that one person in 90 across the whole planet has got one. And as a result of that, it is said that the AK47 has killed more people than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Think of any conflict since 1947 and its a fairly safe bet that at least one of the sides has been using AK47s. The warlords in Mogadishu, the Vietcong in Vietnam, the Republican Guard in Iraq. This half-timbered gun has been a 50-year thorn in Uncle Sams side."

"Design is rarely art because design, when all is said and done, exists purely to make money. And yet the AK was never designed to do that. In fact Mikhail Kalashnikov lives today on nothing more than a Soviet Army pension. And thats why his most famous creation can be called an art form. And thats what gives it soul."

"For all the billions of dollars spent by the United States military on space-age weapons and technology, the AK still remains the most devastating weapon on the planet. Its banana-shaped magazine gives this gun a familiar silhouette that makes it a symbol of third-world rebellion and power. Unlike the scourge of land mines in the world, the eighty to one hundred million AKs manufactured and distributed since the rifles invention in 1947 pose a more dangerous threat because they can be easily transported, repaired, and used by roving bands of assailants. The AK has made possible coups in Africa, terrorist raids in the Middle East, and bank robberies in Los Angeles. It has become a cultural icon, its signature shape defining in our consciousness what a deadly rifle is supposed to look like. Why has the AK earned such a legendary reputation? The gun has few moving parts so it hardly ever jams. It doesnt always shoot straight, but in close combat its awesome firepower (600 rounds a minute)) give it a edge over more sophisticated weapon designs, such as the M-16. American GIs in Vietnam reported that AKs buried in rice paddies for six months or more, unearthed filthy and rusted shut, fired perfectly after kicking the action bolt with the heel of a boot."

"Much mythology has accrued around the AK, mainly on account of Hollywood representations. If you dig deeper, however, you find that it is no more powerful than many other assault rifles and is not particularly accurate. What it dies deliver, in spades, is awesome reliability, total ease of use and maintenance, and vast distribution across the world."

"The author has personally spoken to soldiers who have unearthed an AK after six months buried in the mud at the bottom of an African river, and fired straight through a magazine on full-auto without even cleaning the gun. (The AK barrels are also chromium-lined, and therefore incredibly resilient.) The furniture is similarly tough, whether the variant is fitted with a solid wooden stock or one of the folding metal types. Keep it clean and the AK will last a lifetime."

"The Trace: Does it matter what kind of gun a victim is shot with? David H. Newman: It matters a great deal. If it’s a small caliber gun, the wounds are visibly smaller. If it’s a shotgun wound, it’s more visually striking. I’ve seen children who have been shot with a shotgun. I remember this one boy, I think he was eight, he and a friend were playing with a shotgun, and his friend shot him in the face. When he came in, he was still very much alive, but he was in terrible pain and didn’t really have any facial features. But the worst is a wound from an AR-15 or AK-47 — high-muzzle velocity weapons, which impart a tremendous amount of kinetic energy into the body. Those are much more destructive. You’re looking at a wound that, externally, is two, three, four times bigger than any handgun wound. And that is reflective of the damage that happens on the inside. When a bullet from a high-muzzle velocity weapon hits the intestines, it’s like an explosion, whereas a low-muzzle velocity can be very similar to a knife going through the intestines; there’s bleeding, but it doesn’t destroy the whole area. A high-muzzle bullet, however, destroys whole areas of body. With a bone that’s been shot with a standard-issue caliber handgun, you’ll see a break, a hole in the bone, and maybe some displacement. But a high-muzzle weapon shatters that bone into hundreds of microscopic pieces, in a way that cannot be repaired. You need to essentially clean out the bone that has been struck and remove it from the body; it’s now a worthless tissue. You can’t believe that a bullet could do this amount of damage."

"Is there a design this good that doesnt kill people?"