The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  Such an inquiry could begin at many points over a roughly one-hundred-year span. Here, it will start with Dr. Richard J. Gatling, whose invention in 1862 of the Gatling gun provided armies with their first reasonably effective rapid-fire arm—a massive, misunderstood, and often unwanted weapon that became the precursor to the rest. The early Gatling system weighed, more or less, a ton. It had no more mobility than an artillery piece, and required a crew of men to fire and a train of mules or horses to move about the battlefield. In its early forms it was temperamental, prone to jamming, and often despised by traditionalists who did not understand what it pointed to. And yet it was, in the history of conflict, of singular importance: Distinct shapes of modern war and instability can be traced through the miniaturization and proliferation that followed Gatling’s designs. In 1949, the Soviet selection of the AK-47 as its standard military arm marked a decisive moment in this evolution. A superpower had managed the effective miniaturization of a rapid-fire arm that could be wielded by a single man in almost all the typical situations in which a firearm might be useful. Gatling’s ton became, in a fully loaded Kalashnikov, about ten pounds—a weapon compact enough to be worn beneath a coat. To compete with this new weapon, combatants faced a choice. Either use the Kalashnikov, or come up with a rifle that could match it in a fight. War reorganized around Stalin’s gun.

  Why does this remain a subject, more than half a century on? One weapon alone has been a consistently lethal presence in modern war: the infantry rifle. Tanks can rout conventional armies. GPS-guided ordnance can scatter combatants. Land mines, suicide bombers, and improvised explosives have attracted more attention in recent years. Yet the rifle remains preeminent. Whenever an idea organizes for battle it gathers around its guns. Few weapons are as accessible or can be as readily learned. No other weapon appears in as many conflict areas year after year. None is as sure to appear in each future war, if only because no other weapon is as well suited for as many missions and tasks. And of all the rifles available for war today, the Kalashnikov line stands apart as the most abundant and widely used rifle ever made. Virtually everyone has seen a Kalashnikov. With its stubby black barrel with a parallel gas tube above, its steep front sight post, and the distinctive banana clip, its unmistakable profile has become a constant presence in the news. It is the world’s most widely recognized weapon, one of the world’s most recognizable objects.

  More than six decades after its design and initial distribution, more than fifty national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies. But its fuller terrain lies outside the sphere of conventional force. The Kalashnikov marks the guerrilla, the terrorist, the child soldier, the dictator, and the thug—all of whom have found it to be a ready equalizer against morally or materially superior foes. A roster of its handlers holds a history of modern strife. Celebrated by Soviet propagandists as a tool for self-defense and liberation, its first lethal uses were for repression—crushing uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956, and for shooting fleeing civilians trying to cross the Iron Curtain’s borders. Once it grew beyond border and crackdown duty in Eastern Europe, and became an automatic weapon for global combat service, it was instantly a groundbreaking firearm, a weapon that rearranged the rules. In the 1960s, when American Marines encountered AK-47s in urban warfare, at Hue City in Vietnam, they discovered that a single guerrilla with a Kalashnikov could slow a company’s advance; they used cannon to rubble buildings in which AK-toting Viet Cong marksmen hid.4 Its power, today a battlefield norm, was at first of an almost unseen sort, at least among the weapons that could be wielded by one man. Interest in it was immediate. Engineers in Finland and Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia secured early versions of the weapon and developed unlicensed knockoffs straightaway. After leading the revolution that put him atop Cuba, Fidel Castro amassed stores of Soviet assault rifles and distributed engraved Kalashnikovs as gifts. Idi Amin armed his Ugandan forces with Kalashnikovs and appointed himself president for life. Yasir Arafat procured them for the PLO and the many terrorist groups that spread from Fatah. Since it first entered the martial consciousness, no matter the year or theater, the Kalashnikov has appeared. Its followers cross all lines. The Egyptian army outfitted itself with Kalashnikovs. Islamic Jihad used a Kalashnikov to assassinate the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. Its durability and availability have made it more popular with the passing of time; the great numbers of its manufacture and the multiple sellers offering it ultimately ensured that it would be turned against the army that created it, as was the case in the Soviet-Afghan War and then again in Chechnya.

  By the 1980s, with several sources simultaneously arming both sides of the Afghan conflict, the country filled with AK-47s and their derivatives. A durable assault rifle can have many lives over the decades of its existence, and in Afghanistan the weapons were recycled repeatedly, passed from fighter to fighter by many means. In the Panjshir Valley, a chasm in the mountains north of Kabul, the rifle sometimes became a family heirloom. The valley had been the scene of some of the most intense fighting in the early years of the war; its canyons became backdrops for mujahideen legend. Several times the Soviet army thrust armored columns up the valley, sometimes enveloping the guerrillas by using helicopters to land troops on mountain passes to cut off withdrawing mujahideen. Each time the Soviet forces controlled territory briefly before being subjected to persistent attacks. The valley was never conquered, and its villages were never co-opted or tamed. First among the Soviet army’s foes was Ahmad Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik commander whose charisma and tactical adroitness became part of Afghan lore. Massoud’s fighters were fit and skilled. But they too suffered. After one Soviet incursion, Massoud attended the funeral of a dead guerrilla. He lifted the man’s Kalashnikov and carried it to the deceased man’s younger brother, Ashrat Khan. The commander’s mastery of quiet ceremony, like his sense for tactics, had reached a high state of polish.

  “Do you want to be a mujahid?” Massoud asked.

  Ashrat Khan extended his hands. He accepted the rifle.

  “Yes, I am going to take my brother’s weapon,” he said. “I am going to be with you.”5

  At moments such as these, the Kalashnikov’s infiltration of the martial world was nearing completion. Afghans were using it for the same purpose that Mikhail Kalashnikov insisted had motivated him—to defend their native land. Ashrat Khan became a fighter. He eventually lost his brother’s Kalashnikov in combat, but he obtained another and survived the war.

  The rifle assumed uses that were at once soldierly and ceremonial, and over the decades it reached far beyond conflicts in which the Kremlin played a primary role. When Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, was mourned in 2004 by his followers in Gaza, his casket was guarded by masked men at the ready with folding-stock AKs. The scene was a throwback. Six years earlier along the Cambodian-Thai border the body of Pol Pot was attended by teenage gunmen carrying an Asian version of the same gun.

  Mastering a Kalashnikov is one of the surest ways to become an underground fighter in our time. In Belfast both sides of the Irish question used them in clashes and political art. In Afghanistan and Pakistan student notebooks from al Qaeda camps showed that the opening class in jihad curricula was a lesson on Kalashnikov’s avtomat. Along with the rocket-propelled grenade, the portable mortar tube, and the makeshift bomb, the automatic Kalashnikov completes the quartet of weapons for the resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq, where insurgents rely on the local version, the Tabuk, which was churned out in the 1970s and 1980s in a state-owned Iraqi factory with Yugoslav technical help, then cached throughout the country before American tanks rolled in from Kuwait. No pariah seems far from his personal inventory of this dated Russian design. In his first taped message after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden held a microphone near his beard and told the world that “the winds of faith and change have blown.” It was his movie, he could put in it anything he wanted. Beside him was a Kalash
nikov leaning against a rock.

  Bin Laden understood the symbolic potency of his choice. Others keep their Kalashnikovs near for more practical tasks. By the time Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hole in Ad Dawr, in late 2003, the fugitive president had distilled his possessions to a modern outlaw’s basic needs: two AK-47s and a crate of American cash. (He also had a pistol, a 9-millimeter Glock.) Kalashnikovs are not just tools for the battlefield. They guard South American coca plantations and cocaine-processing labs. In Los Angeles they have served bank robbers and urban gangs; in the northwestern United States survivalists squirrel them away in anticipation of the worst. African poachers use them to thin wildlife populations and defend their illegal trade against antipoaching patrols, which carry Kalashnikovs, too. In the western Pacific, the aboriginal Chukti people fire Kalashnikovs at migrating gray whales, the post-Soviet manifestation of an ancient hunt the Chukti call traditional, even as they slap magazines into place and click their infantry arms off safe. Given that the automatic Kalashnikov was conceived with the intention of shooting 160-pound capitalists, its use against 30-ton marine mammals would seem ill-advised. But the rifle at hand is the rifle that gets used. Kalashnikovs are regularly at hand.

  No one can say for certain how many Kalashnikovs exist today. Their production in secrecy, often in some of the planet’s harshest dictatorships, has made precise accounting impossible. One point is beyond dispute. They are the most abundant firearms on earth. Since the Soviet army chose the AK-47 for distribution to Soviet ranks, automatic Kalashnikovs have been made in Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, China, East Germany, Egypt, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), and the United States. Knock-off versions, incorporating the main elements of Kalashnikov’s operating system, were developed in Croatia, Finland, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Israel. (The Israel Defense Forces were so impressed, and concerned, by the performance of Egyptian Kalashnikovs in the Six Day War in 1967 that Yisrael Galili and Yaacov Lior borrowed the AK-47’s main features to create a series of weapons at Ramat HaSharon.) More Kalashnikovs are made every year (though at a lesser pace than in decades past). Venezuela plans to build a new plant, which could be used to arm groups throughout the region in a new round of opaque handouts. A single comparison provides a sense of the automatic Kalashnikov’s spread. The second-most-abundant family of rifles is the American M-16 family; fewer than 10 million have been made.6[1] Serious estimates put the number of Kalashnikovs and its derivatives as high as 100 million. There could be one Kalashnikov for every seventy people alive.

  Where did all these rifles go? Huge numbers filled state arsenals, issued to Eurasian communist armies and stockpiled around the Cold War’s anticipated fronts. Untold millions were sold, others simply given to those thought to need them by the KGB and the Soviet army or their cousins in other communist states. During decades of influence jockeying, the Cold War saw the shipment of enormous quantities of Kalashnikovs to proxy forces, from the Viet Cong to militias in Beirut. Lists resemble tour guides to troubled lands: Russian, Chinese, and North Korean Kalashnikovs were carried by the North Vietnamese Army; Polish Kalashnikovs were shipped to the Contras; East German Kalashnikovs went to Yemen; Romanian AKs armed the Kurds; Russian and Bulgarian AK-47s supplied Rwanda; the United States directed Chinese and Egyptian Kalashnikovs to Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet mujahideen. Chinese Kalashnikovs are abundant in Uganda and Sudan. By the time the Iron Curtain fell, it had become difficult to travel outside Western democracies without seeing Kalashnikovs in some form. There are more Kalashnikovs circulating now than then; when state socialism collapsed, arsenals were looted and weapons locked within were trucked away for sale. For people who study the universe of disorder, automatic Kalashnikovs serve as reasonably reliable units of measure. Arms-control specialists and students of conflict look to the price of Kalashnikov assault rifles in a nation’s open-market arms bazaars to determine both the degree to which destabilized lands are awash in small arms and the state of risk. When prices rise, public anxiety is considered high. When they sink, the decline can indicate a conflict is ebbing. Because there is no surer sign that a country has gone sour than the appearance of Kalashnikovs in the public’s grip, they can also function as an informal social indicator, providing another sort of graduated scale. Anywhere large numbers of young men in civilian clothes or mismatched uniforms are carrying Kalashnikovs is a very good place not to go; when Kalashnikovs turn up in the hands of mobs, it is time to leave.

  In the aftermath of the Cold War the overabundance of automatic Kalashnikovs has remained a persistent factor in terrorism, crime, ethnic cleansing, and local and regional destabilization. Their widespread presence empowers unflagged and undisciplined forces to commit human rights abuses on a grander scale, raises the costs and exacerbates the dangers of peacekeeping missions, emboldens criminals of many sorts, stalls economic development, and increases the social burdens of caring for the wounded, the orphaned, and the displaced. Having been shipped to regions rife with the tensions of poverty, poor governance, and high ethnic, religious, or nationalist sentiment, the avtomat has helped to instigate and expand conflicts. And the prevalence of the Kalashnikov has helped the modern underground fighter to transform himself into today’s protean, shadowy enemy, giving shape to the Pentagon’s term for the conflicts in which the American military is almost irretrievably enmeshed—asymmetric war.

  Studies of military small arms have documented their role in a stubborn toll of instability, injury, and death. The United Nations convened a conference in 2001 by noting that small arms were principal weapons in forty-six of the forty-nine major conflicts in the 1990s, in which 4 million people died. In 2004 Human Rights Watch identified eighteen nations where child soldiers are still used. For most of these wars and most of these young conscripts, Kalashnikovs are the primary arm. The available American casualty data from Iraq show that bullets fired from the Eastern bloc’s family of firearms remain, injury by injury, the most lethal wounding agent on the battlefield. (In Afghanistan and Iraq, bombs have killed more soldiers. But of all the ways a soldier could be wounded there, bullets have been more likely to kill than any other. Put another way, soldiers wounded in bomb blasts have a statistically greater likelihood of survival than those who have been shot.) Moreover, Kalashnikovs outlive strife; bandits find them as useful as soldiers ever did. Even a single Kalashnikov can set a nation in motion. In 1989, after the drifter Patrick Purdy opened fire with a Kalashnikov on a schoolyard in Stockton, California, striking thirty-four children and a teacher, Congress began work on the assault weapon ban. Purdy did not use a true automatic Kalashnikov. His rifle was not an automatic. It had been modified to shoot a single bullet with each trigger pull, making it no more dangerous (and arguably less, considering the medium-powered cartridges it fired) than the rifles in many a deer camp. The facts hardly mattered. The mere appearance of a Kalashnikov in a schoolyard crowded with children, its look, was enough to put Congress in a lawmaking mood.

  Look is important to Kalashnikovs. In their march from secrecy to ubiquity Kalashnikovs have become more than weapons. They have become symbols—first of the industrial success of Stalin’s Soviet Union and the socialist way, later of popular insurrection, armed liberation, and gangland stature, more recently of jihad. A Kalashnikov can be appropriated for most any cause. An AK-47 with bayonet attached appears on the flag of Mozambique; it shares that flag with a hoe and a book, as if it were one of a young nation’s foundational tools. Another Kalashnikov-like rifle, held aloft by a defiant fist, adorns the emblem of Hezbollah. Here its meaning is different. The flag is not about victory, not yet. It’s about the fight. In Hollywood the Kalashnikov suggests the bad guy, the lunatic, the connoisseur tough. “AK-47—the very best there is,” the actor Samuel L. Jackson said in one of his well-known roles. “When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room.”

  These mixed meanings make a potent brew. The Kalashnikov stirs feel
ings, for and against, and the savvy have learned to tap its many meanings for their own purposes. In Missouri in mid-2009, when Mark Muller, the owner of a car dealership, wanted to generate interest and lift flagging sales, he offered a voucher for an AK-47 with the purchase of every pickup truck. The offer was a gimmick. True AK-47s cannot be legally owned by most people in the United States, and the dealership offered a coupon worth only half the price of the semiautomatic version sold in American gun shops. Once again, as is often the case in conversations related to the Kalashnikov, facts did not matter. Nonsense prevailed. Muller’s sales promotion generated international attention: A broadcast team from Al Jazeera turned up, as did another from Russian state television news. The coverage triggered old arguments. What does this weapon mean? Is it the sinister product of sinister forms of government, set loose on the world via dark processes that were, and often remain, all but unchecked? Or does its reliability and simplicity make it a symbol of the virtue of our best tools, a companion to the utility of a well-performing pickup truck? Muller was pleased. He appeared before the cameras brandishing a Kalashnikov in its semiautomatic form, enjoying free publicity while spurring business and tweaking the anti-gun crowd at the same time. Like many a man who has used a Kalashnikov, he held up his rifle for the cameras and grinned—the rascal’s pose. The Kalashnikov was put to yet another use.