A few years later, a lighter and easier-to-manufacture update, the AKM, entered mass production in Russia, and was on its way to becoming the standard rifle for almost all Communist ground forces. The AK-47, with an effective range beyond the length of a pair of football fields, was accepted in 1947. Kalashnikov, a wounded veteran of tank warfare on the Soviet Union’s western front, was credited with developing a prototype for a medium-powered rifle capable, like the sturmgewehr, of both automatic and semiautomatic fire. In the evaluations and field trials that followed, Senior Sgt. The weapon was to be a conceptual copy of the sturmgewehr, which Nazi Germany had fielded late in the war. As Soviet scientists worked on nuclear arms that would freeze borders in place under the fear of total war, teams of gunsmiths and engineers set out in a contest to design a conventional weapon - a rifle - that would combine the rapid-fire ferocity of machine guns with the portability of lighter-weight arms. The answers reach to the years immediately after World War II, when the Soviet Union was developing multiple weapons for multiple roles. How did the Kalashnikov - a disruptive technology that flooded the world almost three generations ago and still retains an outsize role in organized violence - become such a ready amplifier of evil and rage? In what ways did it drive the AR-15 and its competitors to such prominence, too? In the hands of terrorists, military-style rifles have repeatedly been used for swiftly killing on a large scale. The FBI said the man who killed 11 worshippers in a synagogue in Pittsburgh fired on them with an AR-15. The authorities said the gunman in Las Vegas used semiautomatic AR-15s, including at least one modified with a so-called “bump stock” to rapidly increase its rate of fire and kill 59 people and wound hundreds more. Semiautomatic versions of the AR-15 were used by sympathizers of the Islamic State in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015, and by gunmen in school attacks a Mini-14 and an MCX, rifles that fire the same cartridge as the AR-15 and compete with it for market share, were used in the mass shootings in Norway in 2011 and in Orlando, Fla., in June. In recent years they have also been descendants of the AR-15, the American military’s response to the Kalashnikov’s spread. Often the rifles are variants of the AK-47, the world’s most abundant firearm, an affordable and simple-to-use assault rifle of Soviet lineage that allows a few people to kill scores and menace hundreds, and fight head-to-head against modern soldiers and police forces. The list reaches back decades: the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 the school takeover in Beslan, Russia, in 2004 the attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008 the mall assault in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2013 the killing of more than 100 people in Paris in 2015 the firing into a country music concert in Las Vegas in October 2017, which killed at least 58 people and wounded hundreds more in the most lethal mass shooting in modern American history the premeditated Valentine’s Day attack by a former student on a high school in Parkland, Fla. A lone gunman or a small group of killers with rifles commits spectacular crimes that seize the attention of the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |