by DAVID AXE
I stood on the banks of the Tigris River and listened to the report of an AK-47 echoing off the water and earth and the low farmhouses behind me, as a distant sniper took aim. It was February 2006, and one of my first up-close introductions to the world’s most famous weapon: a cheap, deadly simple assault rifle designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov for the Soviet army.
Since its introduction in 1949, the AK-47 has become the standard firearm of rogue regimes, armed rebellions, insurgents and extremists. Some 70 million have been manufactured, legally and illicitly, by scores of gun-makers in several countries. It’s featured on the national flag of Mozambique, East Timor’s coat of arms and Hezbollah’s flag. You can buy a knock-off AK for a couple hundred bucks at the famous Pakistani gun market in Durra, near the Khyber Pass.
“No single weapon — save the atomic bomb — has had as profound an impact on modern warfare and global instability,” Larry Kahaner wrote in his biography of the weapon. Moreover, no single weapon has had as profound an impact on my own life. The AK-47 is the weapon that an assortment of Iraqi insurgents, Taliban fighters and Chadian soldiers have used in countless, failed attempts to kill me over the last five years. For me, the AK is more than iconic. It’s personal.
In the summer of 2008 I dodged AK fire and the bodies of dying men on the darkened, dusty streets of Abeche, in eastern Chad. I came home deeply troubled. In an effort to externalize thoughts and feelings that I dared not leave inside, I had an AK tatooed upside-down on the center of my back. I felt better, but still not well. And after surviving a Taliban bomb-and-AK ambush in Logar province, Afghanistan, last fall, I bought my own AK-47 and mounted it on my kitchen wall.
My hippie friends were disturbed by my choice of decor. They didn’t appreciate it when I explained that I was just trying to own my death. Nor did they appreciate the weapon’s balance, its satisfying heft and the gratifying kick and blast when you squeeze the trigger.
Today was War Is Boring‘s first Sunday Gun Fun, an event I intend to host as frequently as my ammo budget will allow. A certain new, female WIB correspondent and a host of my South Carolina gun-nut pals joined me at a state-run range in Newberry for a few hours of wanton gun-play. Besides my AK-47, we had an AR-15, a bunch of .22s, some handguns and a beautiful, powerful, antique Enfield. The sounds of our rifles was the same as the reports from my would-be killers in three war-zones. The difference was in the hands that held the weapons, the minds that guided the hands, and the hearts that governed the minds.
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