My understanding of the consequences of assault-rifle proliferation, and the continued use of Kalashnikov rifles as instruments of state repression, was helped by Natasha Estemirova and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia, and Alisher Saipov in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. All three labored for justice and accountability in lands ruled by violence. All three were murdered for their efforts to uncover the truth, as was Umar Israilov, a source on the insurgency and counterinsurgency in Chechnya, who was shot dead in a contract killing in Vienna after sharing details of crimes by government officials in Russia. To these victims, and to the American, Afghan, Russian, and Iraqi service members wounded or killed on operations I was allowed to be part of or that I witnessed up close, words cannot convey the depth of my thanks, or of our loss.
None of the people mentioned above, or anyone else, deserves any blame for errors in this book or conclusions I have drawn that do not align with theirs. All responsibility lies with me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. J. CHIVERS is a senior writer for
ILLUSTRATIONS
The first reasonably effective rapid-fire arm was the Gatling gun, shown here in patent drawings submitted by its inventor, Dr. Richard J. Gatling, in 1862. Gatling claimed he entered the weapons business to save lives. His weapon was not a true machine gun; firing it required a man to turn a crank. But it was the precursor to the rest.
As the killing powers of rapid-fire arms became understood, and manufacturing technology improved, new types of weapons—machines guns, submachine guns, automatic rifles, and assault rifles—entered markets. With time they were brought down in size and price, and connected to planned economies that produced them whether there were customers or not. The lethality, availability, and small size of assault rifles ultimately made them attractive to most anyone, including terrorists. Here, a Kalashnikov with its stock removed, which had been worn on a makeshift sling under the parka of a man who attacked a police station in Nalchik, Russia, during an insurgent raid in 2005. Its owner was dispossessed of it when he was killed. The keys beside the weapon provide a sense of scale. A fully outfitted Gatling could weigh a ton. A Kalashnikov like this weighs less than 8 pounds. (
Richard Gatling—inventor, salesman, cunning businessman—shown late in life. He made a small fortune from the Gatling gun before it was displaced from markets. He died having borrowed money from his son. (
Hiram Maxim, accused trigamist, suspected draft dodger, and self-taught inventor from backwoods Maine, who decamped for London, where he invented the first true automatic weapon, the Maxim machine gun. His weapon changed war. Maxim guns were first used against men in lopsided fighting in colonial Africa and then helped turn World War I into a grisly hell. Maxim, the man, seemed untroubled by it all. He died proud. (
John H. Parker, U.S. Army, one of the first officers in conventional infantry service to grasp the significance of machine gunnery. In the battle for Santiago in 1898, his hastily assembled Gatling detachment pummeled entrenched Spanish positions as the infantry advanced—a new use of rapid-fire arms that earned praise from then- colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Parker was seen as an attention-seeking radical, and mostly was ignored by the army he served. (
The MG08. The primary German version of Maxim’s machine gun. Maxim and his partners sold his weapons and the rights to manufacturer them indiscriminately, including to nations that would become the enemies of his adopted country. The German military grasped what other Western armies did not, and the MG08 shaped the Western experience of World War I, wrecking untold lives. But it was still large—an instrument of the state, not of the individual man. (
The celebrated face of a breakthrough arm. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the noncommissioned officer the Soviet Union credited with designing the AK-47, the descendants of which would become the world’s most abundant firearm. Shown here roughly two decades later, as a decorated Soviet hero. The rifle’s origins are more complex, and more interesting, than the Soviet fables that helped make Kalashnikov’s last name an informal global brand. (
The guts of an AK-47. The weapon is of exceedingly simple design, and its durability is such that this early AK-47, manufactured in 1954 in Izhevsk, was still in use in 2010 in Marja, Afghanistan. Note the few parts and their intuitive relationship to one another; from top: the receiver cover, the recoil mechanism, the bolt carrier with gas piston. Note as well the external pitting, but the relative cleanliness inside. This was a fully functional rifle, made one year after Stalin died and still performing exactly as the Soviet Union intended more than half a century later in a war against the West. (
The Soviet Army shared assault rifles and the technical information to manufacture them with like-minded states. By the 1950s, the weapon was being produced in the Warsaw Pact countries, China, and North Korea. It was also shared with Egypt and other states. As its numbers grew, it became a symbol. Here, a Chinese-Albanian propaganda poster drew resolve from the rifle’s presence, an accent to the thick-necked, strong-handed optimism of the propaganda-poster genre. The caption reads: “Long live the long-lasting, unbreakable fighting friendship between the Chinese and Albanian people.”
Fuller accounts, and honest assessments, were much more complicated than the propaganda would have it. Jozsef Tibor Fejes, far right, the first known insurgent to carry an AK-47. Fejes obtained his prize after Soviet soldiers dropped their rifles during their attack on revolutionaries in Budapest in 1956. This photograph, taken after a cease-fire agreement, appeared in
