C. Chivers - The Gun

Sometimes the differences between a lightly trained Kalashnikov-wielding gunman and a modern Western soldier can be stark. In one example, from November 2005, a small convoy of American soldiers stopped outside the police station of the Afghan National Police, or ANP, in Zormat in Paktia province. The American patrol leader, from Charlie Company, First Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, had planned to talk with the Afghan police chief. The soldiers, with the air force noncommissioned officers who coordinated the company’s air support, waited outside, standing beside their vehicles and among the milling police officers. One of the Afghan officers leveled his Kalashnikov at the Americans and started shooting. The officer, according to one of the men who was attacked, “came toward our vehicles from the opposite side, maybe forty or fifty feet away before we noticed him and, without warning, raised his AK-47 to his hip and opened fire, yelling. He had wrapped the hand guard in red plastic and wasn’t disciplined with his firing, shooting on full auto. We immediately took cover and none of his rounds hit anyone, but they did chew through the hood of the HMMWV [a military vehicle] I was standing beside, spraying fiberglass into the face of the sergeant standing beside me. Before anyone else had a chance really to react beyond taking cover, the gunner in the turret simply turned his M249 SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun] and pretty much cut the ANP in half. After searching through his pockets, they found something along the lines of six months of pay which indicated he was likely paid off.” (Personal communication from Staff Sergeant Bertrand Fitzpatrick, United States Air Force, who was present at the attack.)

The oft-repeated conventional wisdom is that the rifle on the Hezbollah flag is a Kalashnikov. The rifle’s magazine resembles that of a Kalashnikov, as does its stock. The front sight post does not, and a case could be made that the image more closely resembles the G3 rifle, a widely circulated product of Heckler & Koch and another descendant of the sturmgewehr , which was designed in a Spanish–West German collaboration in the 1950s. Or it might simply be sloppy political art. Similar uncertainty surrounds the emblem of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, which included the image of an assault rifle that is often called a Kalashnikov. The common assertion about Hezbollah’s choice is not the most glaring error in the legends of Kalashnikov symbols. That distinction perhaps falls to the frequent claim that the logo of the Red Army Faction, the now-defunct left-wing German terrorist organization, bore the image of a Kalashnikov. The weapon on the group’s red-star logo is an MP-5 submachine gun, also a product of Heckler & Koch.

Special Forces soldiers.

Saakashvili and his military leadership also seemed not to know much about choosing its rifles—it bought thousands of Bushmaster M-4s, knockoffs that resemble the American military’s standard Colt carbines but are not made to the same certified manufacturing standards. This was a strange choice, given that for roughly the same price, the Georgian military could have purchased the more combat-tested design. Military rifle choices have long confounded political and military leaders. This was another such case.

The precise figure given was twelve thousand Pakistani rupees.

Government purchasers can buy military-standard M-4s for about $800 a rifle. The American military pays more because its M-4s include an after-market rail system to which accessories can be mounted. This pushes up the price.

In an email later, Mahmoud expanded upon his question that night. The email read, in part: “I would like to ask Mr. Kalashnikov, what made you think about making such a horrible machine? What were you thinking about? Helping people or destroying their lives? I’m sure that you are a smart guy. Why didn’t you go for finding a way to bring peace to life again? What we had—all those kind of guns through history—wasn’t enough to make a man think about something more useful for people’s lives rather than finding another killing machine? Why? I know that sometimes that piece of metal was helping nations to survive. But how about if there were no guns at all, not for attack and not for protection. What would happen? … It is not just me, and it is not only thousands who got injured or killed by your ideal machine. I’m wondering—how about if you tried it on yourself, one bullet into your feet before sending it out to the market. That might change your mind?”

His factory salary was roughly three times that of a typical worker at the plant, when the workers were paid at all.

A second try at the vodka market, this time through a British businessman who took the Kalashnikov name up-market with a brand to compete with Grey Goose, flopped, too. The designer’s surname brought no magic; it might as well have been Scud. For several years, one of the general’s grandsons labored to capitalize on it too, marketing a line of Kalashnikov pocketknives, snowboards, thermoses, sunglasses, and umbrellas. Brochures with the products were abundant at trade shows. Sales appeared negligible. By 2004, Mikhail Kalashnikov expected no turnabout. “For now I haven’t experienced any financial benefit,” he said. “There aren’t yet any results.” The ventures all suffered in part from their organizers’ misunderstanding of the meaning of the Kalashnikov line. They insisted that the word Kalashnikov rang with the many admirable traits they saw in the rifle or the man: quality, reliability, fidelity to nation, and the rest. They did not grasp that among many would-be customers, away from the catechisms of Soviet propaganda, it might mean something else.

The museum, which struggled for years to raise money for its construction, provides a series of stories within a story. Kalashnikov derided the men who dismantled the Soviet Union and profited from the looting of state assets afterward. The museum in Izhevsk that is dedicated to him was built with donations from Anatoly B. Chubais, one of the main architects of the privatization of state assets, who profited handsomely in the process. The ironies only get richer. Chubais was nearly assassinated in 2005 by at least two men who ambushed his armored BMW on a road outside Moscow, spraying it with Kalashnikov fire.

The Pentagon’s distribution of automatic weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan was performed for years with scant controls. The situation improved after several years of war, but only after outcry, investigation, and scandal. Many of the weapons by then were lost from custody, and in the hands of insurgents, criminals, and sellers in bazaars.