The Gun (4 page)

Third, this book does not attempt to address the core arguments over the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. There are several reasons for this. The book is principally concerned with events and activities outside the United States, and with roles that automatic weapons play in conflict zones and regions of instability. Their effects upon stable, developed, Western democracies are of an entirely different
order, and so of limited interest in this treatment. Where this book does examine events within the United States, these events are mostly matters of nineteenth-century conflict, arms development and sales, military policy, and the evolution of tactical choices in officers’ circles. The Second Amendment, and the many questions of individual rights and public policy that surround it, is another subject. This is especially so because throughout the period of their existence, the Kalashnikovs discussed here, which in the United States are classified under federal law as weapons covered by the 1934 National Firearms Act—essentially, as machine guns—have not been available to most American citizens. As such, they are largely removed from the main disputes over how to define and legislate the right to bear arms in the present day. Moreover, the Kalashnikov rifles that are in circulation in the United States are almost all semiautomatic arms, and fire a single shot for each trigger pull. For this reason—the fact that they are not fully automatic weapons—they are not Kalashnikovs as the rest of the world understands them.

Fourth, on the subject of sources: To explore the more challenging periods or characters, especially within the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact, the middle portion of this book brings together conflicting sources and positions them against each other. Many sources are sound. Some are not verifiable, but have enough merit to be included with attribution and explanation. Some are suspicious or outright false and are declared to be so in the text. The value of the dubious sources is that they demonstrate both a portion of the lies that have been circulated and the reasons why. The Soviet Union deployed falsehoods for practical purposes, and its propaganda—pernicious and sustained for decades—has indelibly informed the public understanding of the Kalashnikov line. It is worthwhile, then, for a reader, when examining Soviet military history from official and contemporaneous Soviet sources, to remember the words of General Aleksei Yepishev, chief political commissar of the Soviet armed forces. In a helpfully apt summary of much of what was published in Soviet times, Yepishev dismissed the complaints of Georgy K. Zhukov, marshal of the Soviet Union, whose memoirs were being “edited” by a Communist Party rewrite team in ways that removed criticism of Stalin, made them more celebratory and platitudinous, and included cameo appearances by senior communist officials who demanded that they appear in the text, no matter their relevance to the story. (Leonid Brezhnev, who
never saw Zhukov in the war years, was among those who insisted on being named.) To Zhukov’s objections, Yepishev said: “Who needs your truth if it stands in our way?”
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This is part of the nature of official Soviet history, and it frames one of the challenges to objective researchers of the period. And for exactly this reason, Soviet sources are useful, even necessary, when clearly shown for what they are. They go to the very character and motivations of actors involved, and provide readers with a basis for a healthy skepticism of official stories in the national stock.

The nature of available sources drove choices in structure. The book is arranged to present three periods of a history: the origins of rapid-fire arms, the development and mass distribution of Eastern bloc assault rifles, and the effects these weapons have had on security and war. The middle section in places offers differing accounts and allows for triangulation. This approach has utility in presenting contradictory statements by Soviet propagandists and by Mikhail Kalashnikov about the invention and development of this weapon, and about the designer’s personal history. Again, it provides a foundation for skepticism. The clarity with which Soviet and Russian falsehoods are visible should not be taken as an indication that Western sources on Western arms told the truth. Sometimes they did; other times they did not. Arms designers and military officers in the West, and one now-defunct firm with a prominent place in this book—Colt’s Firearms Division of Colt Industries—engaged in untrustworthy behaviors. But there is a difference between Western sources and sources with a Soviet influence. In the West, the availability of materials in archives, and laws that allow at least a modicum of public access to once-classified reports, allow the Western portion of this history to emerge in a crispness of detail that is not yet possible in much of the old Soviet space, where legends, though challenged and under strain from post-Soviet disclosures, manage to live on.

Fifth, a note to the collector, enthusiast, industrial historian, or forensic investigator: This book does not attempt to provide a full field guide to Kalashnikov-style weapons, the ammunition they fire, and the factories that produced them. Such a reference would be, without question, a valuable resource, including as a tool for helping soldiers and law enforcement officers to trace collected weapons to their sources. It would also be a different book. But the field-guide notion is worth addressing here. A small number of firearms references have attempted this, at least
in part, and the United States military has quietly built an arms database, known as CHUCKWAGON, that provides this service to its users. The Pentagon’s database includes data not just on weapon types by style and serial numbers and their sources of production but also on intermediate handlers, including governments and units that have possessed distinctly identifiable weapons at certain times. But for private citizens, none of the publicly available tools are complete, and all of them have errors. Most of them also repeat legends and common mistakes.
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An effort to provide that service here would no doubt include errors as well, partly owing to the secrecy and deception of many Kalashnikov producers, and partly because the official database, which might be used to refine such a record for the public, is closed to unofficial users.

Sixth, for those interested or invested in the continuing disputes about what cartridge and rifle combination would be best for conventional military duty in 2010 and beyond, this book does not recommend one cartridge or weapon over others. It deals bluntly with problems that surrounded the American military’s introduction in the 1960s of the M-16 rifle and the 5.56-millimeter cartridges it fired—a reaction to Kalashnikov proliferation that, in its early years, resulted in a weapon not ready for war. But the most pressing problems of that era were addressed well more than a generation ago, and much of the historical discussion is not relevant to comparisons between rifles offered for government service today. Moreover, the highly charged rifle-selection disputes that persist—between advocates of the SCAR, the M-4, the XM8, and many others, including new variants of the Kalashnikov line—are not treated here. That could be another book. The experiences of soldiers and Marines described in this book do have bearing on that conversation. They suggest that those who choose new rifles for military organizations should be wary of hype, and of salesmen pushing new products. The best tests of an automatic rifle occur in the body of experience accumulated during its service in combat over time. Many of the choices offered today have not been widely used by many hands, or have been used by secretive forces whose operations are not transparent and whose experiences are not sufficiently known and available for considered reflection and review. It is not the ambition of this book to champion one rifle over others. Based on what is publicly known, the limits of any endorsement are too great.

Similarly, this book avoids a celebration of the Kalashnikov’s technical
merits. The AK-47 was, in hindsight, a predictable assimilation of converging ideas of military small-arms design. It came into existence via smart borrowing of others’ work and emerged as a compromise between established classes of firearms. Like all compromises, it was imperfect. Its descendants do have remarkable traits. Mostly they have been well made. But they are not engineering miracles or monuments to perfection, as often portrayed. Limitations and weaknesses inhabit the Kalashnikov design. These emerge starkly, for example, when the distances between a shooter and potential targets stretch out. For this reason, the Kalashnikov line has showed itself in Afghanistan and Iraq to be more than adequate for insurgents seeking to undermine weak governments or to prey on the unarmed, but less useful against a well-trained conventional foe possessing rifles and machine guns with longer effective ranges. Eastern bloc assault rifles were exceptionally well matched to fighting in Vietnam, where humid conditions and short ranges were common and these rifles gained early fame. For conventional desert fighting, the Kalashnikov is not ideal.

Last, this book also avoids making sweeping public-policy proposals. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It documents a portion of a history and delineates a set of problems. It does propose, unequivocally and without qualification, that like the atomic bomb and the weapons of mass destruction that followed it, the Kalashnikov is a Cold War weapon with a legacy as yet unresolved, a legacy that continues to threaten people and security across much of the world. It further proposes that because governments have focused elsewhere, these weapons and the people who have put them to ill use have killed and maimed more people, and dragged many regions deeper into disarray, than they might have otherwise. Still further, it proposes that the Kalashnikov, while a special case, is representative of a larger group of weapons. This book does review certain means of ameliorating the effects of widespread assault-rifle proliferation, but it deliberately leaves questions of the best means of relief and abatement—methods that might bring a degree of peace and stability to many troubled lands—to other hands. This is in part because as an effort at assessing the Kalashnikov’s history, and it effects, this book is not aligned with any interest group or side.

C.J. CHIVERS
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN
JULY 2010

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Other older and more traditional rifles would displace the M-16 from second place if they were still in widespread service, but they fell from common use with the spread of assault rifles. The British Lee-Enfield line, for example, was manufactured in greater numbers than the M-16 during its many decades in use across the old British Empire.

An Invention of No Ordinary Character

R
ICHARD J. GATLING WAS SEEKING BUSINESS. IN THE METICULOUS
penmanship of a man born to a land-owning Southern family, he began a letter to President Abraham Lincoln.

It was February 18, 1864, late in the American Civil War and an extraordinary period in the evolution of firearms: dawn in the age of the machine gun and yet a time when officers still roamed battlefields with swords. At forty-five, Gatling was a medical-school graduate who had never practiced medicine, opting instead to turn his stern father’s sideline as an inventor into a career. For twenty years he had mainly designed agricultural devices. Dr. Gatling, as he liked to be called, came from a North Carolina family that owned as many as twenty slaves.
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But he had moved north to Indiana for business and marriage, and when the war began in 1861 he did not align himself with the secessionists who formed the Confederacy. He knew men on both sides. Far from his place of birth and away from the battlefields, he had taken to viewing the contents of the caskets returning to the railroad depot in Indianapolis. Inside were the remains of Union soldiers, many felled by trauma but most by infection or disease. Seeing these gruesome sights, Gatling shifted attention from farm devices to firearms,
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and to the ambition of designing a rapid-fire weapon, a pursuit that since the fourteenth century had attracted and eluded gunsmiths around the world. “I witnessed almost daily the departure of troops to the front and the return of the wounded, sick and dead,” he wrote. “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—that would by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much
battle duty as a hundred, that it would to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.”
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Gatling did not fit any caricature of an arms profiteer. By the available accounts, he carried himself as a neat and finely dressed gentleman. He was kindhearted to his family and associates, soft-spoken at home, and self-conscious enough that he wore a beard to hide the smallpox scars that peppered his face.
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He made for a curious figure: an earnest and competitive showboat when promoting his weapon, but restrained and modest on the subject of himself. He was, his son-in-law said, “an exception to the rule that no man is great to his valet.”
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One interviewer noted that he professed to feel “that if he could invent a gun which would do the work of 100 men, the other ninety and nine could remain at home and be saved to the country.”
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He repeated this point throughout his life, explaining a sentiment that he insisted rose from seeing firsthand the ruined remains of young men lost in a fratricidal war. His records make clear that he was driven by profits. He never ceased claiming that compassion urged him on at the start.

Gatling was neither a military nor a social visionary. But he was a gifted tinkerer and an unrelenting salesman, and he found good help. His plans proceeded swiftly. Though there is no record of his having prior experience with weapon design, by late 1862, after viewing rival guns, drawing on his knowledge of agricultural machinery, and enlisting the mechanical assistance of Otis Frink,
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a local machinist, he had received a patent for a prototype he called the “battery gun.” “The object of this invention,” he told the U.S. Patent Office, “is to obtain a simple, compact, durable, and efficient firearm for war purposes, to be used either in attack or defence, one that is light when compared with ordinary field artillery, that is easily transported, that may be rapidly fired, and that can be operated by few men.”
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