Why is the AK-47 so good? AK-47s are so good because they are easy to use, cheap to make, reliable, and they can function in extremely harsh conditions. The AK-47 is the most popular gun ever made.
The AK-47 was designed in 1945, finalized in 1947 (hence its name), and went into production in 1948. Since then, over 75 million AK-47s have been produced, making it the most sold and most successful gun of all time. The gun was designed by Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, who gave the weapon, and all the ones that followed it, his name. The full name of the gun is Avtomat Kalashnikova, which, means Kalashnikov’s Automatic rifle in Russian. The 47 is for the year it was introduced.
Kalashnikov grew up in a poor village, but he loved to tinker with machinery. After he finished school, he found a job as a mechanic at a tractor station. He was moved to a nearby weapons design office before being conscripted into the Red Army. He became a tank mechanic and started designing weapons. He was wounded in 1941 and while in hospital he started to come up with the idea for what would become the most popular rifle the world has ever seen. There were other Soviet soldiers in the hospital, and they complained a lot about the weapons they had to use. There were not enough guns to go around in the Soviet Union at the time and soldiers had to share. It was common to pick up a weapon when a comrade was shot. Once he was out of hospital, he set to making a new gun that would solve all of the problems of the old ones. He looked at all of the weapons being used at the time on every side and he tried to work out what made each of them good or bad. Then he tried to combine all of those good features in one gun. This story may or may not be true. There
So, why is the AK-47 so good? The first reason is that they are very very easy to use. They are so easy that people can use them with with almost no training. This is one reason why they have become so popular around the world and they are often seen in the hands of untrained soldiers. They are so easy to use that, unfortunately, children can use them as well. They don’t jam and they can work without being cleaned. They are not very accurate, but that is fine for an untrained soldier.
Probably the main reason why they are considered to be good is their hardiness. AK-47s just don’t seem to break. They can be filled with sand and they fire when the sand is emptied out. They work consistently in any climate or environment on Earth. It is said that AK-47s have been found buried in the ground and they still fire. There are four reasons for this reliability. The first is that the inside of the barrel and the chamber of the AK-47 a chrome plated. That protects them from rust and corrosion that can cause other guns to jam or for things to get stuck in them. This is useful in very hot or very humid climates, which are some of the places where the AK-47 has seen a lot of action. Secondly, they don’t have a lot of moving parts. With any machine, the fewer moving parts it has, the less chance it will have of breaking. The third reason is the length of the springs in the firing mechanism and in the cartridges. They are all longer than they have to be and the gun is designed so that they are never fully extended or compressed. This extends their life and stops them from jamming. And the fourth reason is that they have a lot of space inside the firing chamber. All of the parts in the firing chamber have been designed to have a lot of clearance. That means that any dirt that gets into the firing chamber will either fall out, or the gun will still fire even with it there. This is a huge advantage if you have an army of untrained soldiers because you don’t need to teach them how to clean the gun. However, these large clearances mean that the gun is not very accurate.
The last reason is that they are cheap to make. They are very simple guns and not a lot of work is put into making them super accurate or super stylish. They are very basic, which makes them cheap to make. Also, the large clearances in the firing chamber allow for a lot of tolerance when machining the parts, which makes it cheap. The AK-47 was also never patented, so other countries could manufacture them without a license. China makes an enormous amount of AK-47s every year. Because they are cheap, they are everywhere and because they are everywhere, it is easier for people to get them than other guns. The AK-47 is not the best or the most accurate gun out there, but it is cheap, reliable, and easy to use. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kalashnikov
Image By U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Levi Riendeau – http://www.af.mil/photos/media_search.asp?q=AK-47&page=1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17783376