Free The Gun by C. J. Chivers Page A

fired into the skull. (
Photos from
“Wound-Ballistics Assessment of M-14, AR-15 and Soviet AK Rifles,”
U.S. Army, 1964
)
     

 
    Sometimes, choosing not to display a Kalashnikov can have meaning, too. A member of Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, the Palestinian terrorist group, brandished an M-4 in an interview with the author in 2002. Carrying a rifle used by Israel signified defiance or fighting skill—to acquire its enemies’ rifles, the group depends on corruption or battlefield capture. Displaying the enemies’ guns is a common propaganda device, used the world over. (
Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)
     

 
    Among those who use them, assault rifles can be intensely personal objects or symbols with many meanings. In 2009, an Afghan National Army soldier in Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, decorated his Kalashnikov with unveiled images of women—a seeming rebuke to the Taliban. (
Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)
     

EVERYMANS’S GUN
     

    By the time the Kalashnikov line had entered its second half-century of service, it was firmly entrenched as a primary tool of violence in destabilized lands. The Soviet Union had fallen, the Warsaw Pact had dissolved. The armories and stockpiles were loose, and the weapon was so common in the field that it was scarcely remarked upon. Its effects were easy to find, and chilling. A wounded Taliban fighter, captured by the Northern Alliance in late 2001, on the approach to Kabul. The man was dragged from hiding onto a dirt road, and executed in a frenzy. What the Kalashnikov era has often looked like, in a way rarely documented by camera. The rifle is still used in crackdowns, too. (
Photos by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)
     

 

 
    Karzan Mahmoud, at far right of bottom row. A bodyguard for a Kurdish prime minister in Northern Iraq, Mahmoud was shot repeatedly by assassins with Kalashnikovs not long after this photograph was taken in 2002. The doctors documented twenty-three bullet wounds in his shattered frame. Mahmoud survived. Later, he wondered whether Mikhail Kalashnikov feared for his soul. (
Photo courtesy of Karzan Mahmoud
)
     

 
    For a near decade after going to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, the United States has become a busy distributor of the assault rifles of the former Eastern bloc. Here, a swiftly formed unit of the Afghan National Auxiliary Police in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, 2007, armed with a fresh batch of Kalashnikovs. These units were later disbanded, often without recovering the weapons, the whereabouts of which are unknown. (
Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)
     

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY’S RIFLE
     

    Since their inception, Kalashnikov assault rifles have displayed remarkable durability in harsh conditions. Above, an original Soviet AK-47, manufactured in Izhevsk in 1954. The rifle was still in service in Afghanistan, now in the hands of an Afghan soldier, in 2008. (
Photo by C. J. Chivers
)
     

 
    The Kalashnikov, centerpiece of the former Eastern bloc’s suite of small arms, remains the predominant infantry rifle in use today worldwide. Here, an Afghan patrol in 2007 with arms provided by the United States, approaching a village on a raid with a platoon of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. There is little reason not to expect the Kalashnikov line, and the consequences of its wide distribuition, to persist for many decades more. (
Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times
)