Forum Post: Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 94 | Better Late Than Never
Posted 10 years ago on Dec. 24, 2013, 7:38 a.m. EST by WSmith
(2698)
from Cornelius, OR
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Just imagine how many American soldiers, Dignitaries and civilians were killed by this bastard!
Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the arms designer credited by the Soviet Union with creating the AK-47, the first in a series of rifles and machine guns that would indelibly associate his name with modern war and become the most abundant firearms ever made, died on Monday in Izhevsk, the capital of the Russian republic of Udmurtia, where he lived. He was 94.
(The ubiquitous AK-47 used in Benghazi, Libya.)
Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for the republic’s president, confirmed the death, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.
Born a peasant on the southern Siberian steppe, General Kalashnikov had little formal education and claimed to be a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weapons to conceive of a rifle that achieved battlefield ubiquity.
His role in the rifle’s creation, and the attention showered on him by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, carried him from conscription in the Red Army to senior positions in the Soviet arms-manufacturing bureaucracy and ultimately to six terms on the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s legislative body.
Tens of millions of Kalashnikov rifles have been manufactured. Their short barrels, steep front-sight posts and curved magazines made them a marker of conflict that has endured for decades. The weapons also became both Soviet and revolutionary symbols and widespread instruments of terrorism, child-soldiering and crime.
He regretted creating the AK-47
Not what I heard, stating he slept well at night, but it's hard to imagine not having regrets.