ET Markets Conclave — Cryptocurrency. Reshape Tomorrow Tomorrow is different. Let's reshape it today. Corning Gorilla Glass TougherTogether. ET India Inc. ET Engage. ET Secure IT. Web Stories. Morning Brief Podcast. Economy Agriculture. Foreign Trade. Company Corporate Trends. Defence National International Industry. In general, however, a true AK has a fully automatic setting, which is illegal in the United States. Models with semi-automatic settings are available and legal in the U.
Manufacturers cannot make or import fully automatic weapons for the civilian market. Any automatic weapon fully registered before May , with the passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act, can be purchased or sold. This means there is a market of an estimated , legal automatic weapons in the United States. The AK is the deadliest weapon ever built, on the whole. Its kill count even tops nuclear weapons in sheer numbers. But the first AKs were very heavy and weren't really built for aiming.
Kalashnikov wanted to develop a compact weapon that still delivered firepower within meters that could bring a blaze of bullets with ammunition light enough that soldiers could carry a lot of it. A real Kalashnikov is surprisingly difficult to fire for a standard infantry weapon, but it was still very easily produced and easily used. Everyone will still refer to it as an AK or simply "AK" -- because it sounds cool.
The weapon uses a 7. They shatter bones, tear through organs and liquefy other materials as the round tumbles through the body -- often in ways that cannot be repaired. When the M16 rifle was first introduced in the Vietnam War, it had a number of issues. There were so many problems that American troops were killed in combat simply because they couldn't shoot back. Even after the kinks were worked out, a dirty M16 was and is much less likely to operate than a dirty AK Successor governments continue to unload huge stockpiles, further flooding the world.
Among the principal movers of Kalashnikovs has been the Pentagon, which bought them by untold thousands for proxy forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon also distributed tens of thousands of Ms, and the shorter M-4 carbine based on the AR design, to the same forces. Many of these forces failed, yielding their rifles to bazaars or foes, making ever more weapons available to dangerous hands. Today the Kalashnikov and AR variants remain the most commonly seen weapons on modern battlefields; their use is central to almost every war.
They are a staple of insurgency and terrorism and all but fundamental to the grim routine of mass shootings. The Islamic State has killed far more people in Europe with bullets than with bombs, and controls territory in multiple countries in part through its military rifle stocks. Governments have done little to stop the spread of this class of weapons. Often, as in the case of the United States, they have contributed to it. Acts of crime, terror and oppression with Kalashnikovs and AR descendants, endured by civilians under withering fire, have been hard-wired into our times.
There is no end in sight. Chivers is a reporter for the New York Times, a former Marine and the author of "The Gun," a history of the Kalashnikov line and its effects upon security and war.
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Log in. Account Manage my subscription Activate my subscription Log out. The tools of modern terror: How the AK and the AR evolved into rifles of choice for mass killers.
By New York Times. It is two or three or five automatic pistols or disassembled assault rifles in cars or coaches. The volumes, compared with drug trafficking, are tiny — a handful of Kalashnikovs, as opposed to cocaine smuggled in multiples of tonnes — and the gangs behind the trade are also often tight-knit groups. While gun trafficking is not as lucrative as drug dealing, there are still huge profits to be made. Other attractions are the difficulties of detection, particularly across the Schengen borders, and the fact that in many European countries gun trafficking sanctions are less severe than drug smuggling penalties.
While the likes of Vlatko Vucelic are crucial to the trade, trafficking mules are not always required. It was not accompanied by a passenger. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, the Slovakian authorities quietly redrew their laws on deactivated firearms, making it illegal to sell them online, and forcing collectors who choose to buy a decommissioned Kalashnikov to register the firearm.
The illegal conversion of decommissioned weapons, from starter pistols to Kalashnikovs, takes place all over Europe. While decommissioning a Kalashnikov allows it to be legally bought by collectors, the mechanics of rendering the weapon inoperable differ across Europe. But in some other countries, Slovakia included, it is the work of a couple of hours to make the weapon lethal again often by unblocking the barrel and re-installing the firing pin.
Investigations in France have focused on the trade in decommissioned weapons as a source for criminals, and now for terrorists. Last year in Lille an investigation was opened into the middlemen who illegally reconverted decommissioned firearms.
A Brussels-based engineer, a gun dealer in Belgium, and a Lille-based businessman, Claude Hermant, whose company deals in decommissioned firearms, have all been drawn into the inquiry. Hermant has been held in custody since January, accused of the trafficking of decommissioned weapons. His lawyers say he has not been questioned in connection with the investigation into the attacks in Paris.
Brussels is thought to be another nexus for middlemen. With its history of lax firearms laws and a legal gun trade that has created a pool of talented firearms engineers, the unofficial European capital is at the centre of investigations into the sourcing of weaponry for terrorists. Mehdi Nemmouche , accused of killing four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels; Ayoub el-Khazzani, accused of attempting a mass shooting on the Thalys train in August; and Coulibaly are all believed to have found weapons from middlemen in Brussels.
Belgian investigators also suspect that local dealers may have provided some of the weapons to the men whose assault on cafes, bars, a football match and a concert hall in Paris left dead on 13 November. The scruffy streets around the Gare du Midi in Brussels are said to be where much of the illegal gun trading takes place.
Wherever there is serious crime there will be a black market in guns. In the past two years, he said, terrorists had changed their modus operandi towards firearms rather than bombs.
So there is growing demand, and there is also growing supply too. In the past four years the illicit firearms trade has been growing to supply demand from criminals who are increasingly using AKs in countries such as France, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
A senior Croatian official said firearms had recently overtaken drugs as the contraband of choice. At the same time, the French police began to notice that criminals were increasingly using Kalashnikovs. They did a report on it; their language shows how surprised they were.
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