I<\/span>n 2019, Beto O\u2019Rourke, perennial political candidate and full-time professional aging hipster, stood on the stage at the Democratic presidential primary debate and said, \u201cHell yes, we\u2019re going to take your AR-15<\/span>, your AK-47.\u201d<\/p>\n Ah, Beto, bless his heart. As a young man, Mr. O\u2019Rourke posted regularly on the hacktivist website Cult of the Dead Cow. <\/em>His nom de guerre at the time was The<\/em> Psychedelic Warlord. <\/em>With a background like that, we might expect him to get a few details wrong.<\/p>\n Beto would face some unique challenges in trying to take Americans\u2019 AK-47s. There are admittedly at least 20 million AR-15<\/span>s in circulation in America. By contrast, there aren\u2019t likely more than a dozen or so true AK-47s, and I doubt any of those are in private hands. In the world of gun control, semantics are everything. Well-intentioned gun folk on our side are not much better. Actual AK-47s are actually vanishingly rare on this side of the pond. What most people mean when they say AK-47 is AKM. That\u2019s the etymological issue we will dissect today.<\/p>\n And let\u2019s also get one other point out of the way here on the front end. While we are talking about the true select-fire AK-47 and AKM assault rifles in this piece, these are full-automatic-capable firearms heavily restricted from civilian ownership. The \u201cAK\u201d rifles and AR-15<\/span> rifles we as civilians can purchase are purely semi-automatic, meaning they only fire a single round per pull of the trigger.<\/p>\n Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was born a peasant, the 17th<\/sup> of 19 children. Though he never advanced past 7th<\/sup> grade, Kalashnikov fancied himself a poet and published several books on it. Unfortunately, Mikhail\u2019s dad ran afoul of Stalin somehow, so most of his childhood was spent in exile in Siberia. Such was life in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n During WWII, Mikhail Kalashnikov was a T-34 tank<\/a> commander in the Soviet military. After being wounded in the shoulder during the Battle of Bryansk, he was remanded to a field hospital. It was here that he claimed to have had his initial inspiration for the remarkable rifle that would bear his name.<\/p>\n Of his enlightenment, Kalashnikov said, \u201cI was in the hospital, and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: \u2018Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men, when the Germans have automatics?\u2019 So, I designed one. I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov \u2014 AK \u2014 and it carried the year of its first manufacture, 1947.\u201d<\/p>\n Kalashnikov himself admitted that he set out to incorporate the best attributes of both the American M1 Garand<\/a> and the German StG44 assault rifle<\/a> into a single groundbreaking hybrid design. His first rifle prototypes were completed in the fall of 1947 and underwent troop trials in early 1948. This weapon was formally adopted in 1949 as the AK-47.<\/p>\n Those early AK-47 rifles were built around a stamped steel receiver. However, difficulties with quality control, particularly as regards the welding of the guide rails, made mass production a proper headache. As a result, Comrade Kalashnikov went back to the drawing board and developed a milled receiver version that was lyrically reliable. Production of these weapons began in 1951.<\/p>\n Milled receivers had never been Kalashnikov\u2019s plan, so in the late 1950\u2019s the Soviets introduced the stamped receiver \u2014 essentially sheet metal \u2014 Avtomat Kalashnikova Modernizirovanniy or AKM. For many people, this change is the main difference between the rifles. AKM rifles were much easier to produce, yet remained just as reliable as the previous weapon and were much lighter.<\/p>\n This is the modernized version that found its way around the world. With well over 100 million copies in service, the AKM is one of the most influential mechanical devices in all of human history. This brings us back to Beto O\u2019Rourke.<\/p>\n To the purist, the AK47 was only in production for about two years, and few if any of these early guns ever made it into the U.S.. Those that might are likely in government collections someplace. Over time, however, collectors and historians developed their own classification system for Kalashnikov rifle variants independent of the official Soviet bureaucracy. According to this somewhat artificial lexicon, AK rifles fall into four broad categories. Each category could be had with either fixed or under-folding stocks.<\/p>\n The Type I was the original stamped receiver version introduced in 1949. The Type 2 receiver was cut from a massive steel forging. The production run for the Type 2 spanned between 1951 and 1957. The Type 3 was introduced in 1955 and differed slightly from the previous version in the angle of the lightening cuts on the sides of the receiver. This was the most common milled receiver AK. The later AKM hit the streets in 1959 and orbited around the now-perfected 1mm stamped steel receiver.<\/p>\n Live The Armory Life.<\/strong> The latest content straight to your inbox plus an automatic entry to each of our monthly gun giveaways!<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n![\"communist](\"https:\/\/www.thearmorylife.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/communist-rebels-in-rhodesia-with-akm-ak-47-rifles.jpg\")
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AK-47 Origin Story<\/h2>\n
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Semantics<\/h2>\n
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