RIP Mikhail Kalashnikov.

 

Anyone who has ever fired an AK-47 knows that Mikhail Kalashnikov truly gave humanity one of the most wonderful weapons. Easy to use, easy to assemble, it survives in desserts, jungles, artic zones. Doesn’t matter, if you have an AK, you can survive.

Born in 1919, Mikhail Kalashnikov spent much of his boyhood in Siberian exile before he was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1938. Injured in the Battle of Bryansk in 1941, Kalashnikov spent months convalescing in a military hospital. Though he had little formal education, Kalashnikov had an innate talent for tinkering, and spent his days lying in bed and pondering the Nazi forces’ superior firepower. He would later say that “here, in spite of the pain of my injury, I was obsessed night and day by a single thought: inventing a weapon to beat the fascists.”
Source: http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/12/23/mikhail_kalashnikov_the_inventor_of_the_ak_47_has_died.html

There are almost 100 million Kalashnikovs in the world today, 1/5 of the world’s gun supply. Even the word “Kalashnikov” is as universal as “taxi” and “radio,” words people can understand in almost every country.

 Reliable and simple, the AK-47 allowed an inexperienced fighter to match up against a better-trained opponent. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the Vietcong used AK-47s to repel American forces, equipped with inferior M-16s. As such, the gun became immensely popular among guerrillas and rebels worldwide. But it would be naïve to think of the gun as an unalloyed symbol of liberation. As C.J. Chivers wrote in his book The Gun, the AK-47 “was repression’s chosen gun, the rifle of the occupier and the police state.” The gun was put into service in Prague, in East Germany, at Tiananmen Square: “almost any place where a government resorted to shooting citizens to try to keep citizens in check. It would be used by Baathists to execute Kurds in the holes that served as their mass graves. It would shoot the men and boys who were herded to execution in Srebrenica in 1995.”

So Slate assumes that without the AK-47 you can’t murder people? What a joke.
Rest in peace, Comrade Kalashnikov. Your invention will always live in our hearts.