How Kalashnikov Guns Are Made | English Russia

How Kalashnikov Guns Are Made | English Russia:

One of the two things I am learning about blogging is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I see an article or think of something that I think can be a good post, make a note of it because it's going to take thirty minutes to two hours to do supporting research and write the post aaaaaaaaaaaand it never gets done. I've got forty bookmarks that were supposed to be posts that are gathering dust. I'm going to start doing quick posts and then go back later maybe and do a second post to cover the concept/article in depth. This is the first one of those stump posts.

The Kalashnikov or AK series of guns (the AK-47 is most famous but there's an AK-74 and other variants) are the preferred weapon of our enemies. In some parts of the world, they can be gotten for the price of a live chicken and they are as reliable as a hammer. I knew a guy who stored one in an outdoor locker off Lake Erie, forgot about it for the winter, and fired it normally after kicking the bolt back to loosen the rust. They've been dug out of graves in the Middle East and Eastern Europe where they were buried with the men using them before death, had the bolt moved to chamber a round and fired in auto. They aren't accurate by any stretch of the imagination but... they just work. The rifle was designed after World War Two in order to provide the Soviets and eventually anyone who was anti-US with a rifle perfect for illiterate peasants to use effectively. The plant in the post has made over fifty million AKs.

The US needed a decent rifle after the start of Vietnam- the one they were using, the M14, was a modified version of their WW2 rifle, the m1- and eventually chose the M16. The M16 is an ingenious system that allows for easily changing the caliber (I've even seen a M16 crossbow. No, really. It didn't reload itself but the crossbow replaced the barrel.) but is finicky and needs to be kept clean. The original version of the M16 was an utter failure in combat, to the point where a third to a half of the rifles would jam in a firefight and the Pentagon did its best to cover this up until the redesign. The civilian version, the AR, is very popular with hunters because it's accurate and can be easily converted to many other calibers. Maybe half of the zombies killed during the inevitable zombie apocalypse will be shot by AR rifles.

There was a phrase I mentioned earlier, that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the AK is a good example of this. It's utterly reliable, kills a human or zombie very well, and is cheap to produce. The rifle isn't as accurate as it could be and the bullets are a bit heavier than they absolutely need to be (a big deal if you're carrying several hundred into combat) but it just works. The US was looking for a perfect rifle, settled on a good one but has to lie to itself that it's perfect even now (many troops in Afghanistan are carrying backup AKs that they are forced to hide from their superiors). We'll get more in the perfect being the enemy of the good later.



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