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Tuesday, 2019-04-30
Tuesday, 2019-04-02
The Gun by C. J. Chivers
A technical, social and political history of the AK-47 assault rifle and derivatives.
Chivers does a good job tying the design of the gun into Soviet defense policy, and compares the development of the weapon favorably compared to the US introduction of the M16.
The author explores the issues with the massive proliferation of these assault rifles worldwide, but he seems to have a blind spot for the similar proliferation of semi-automatic weapons with large magazine sizes in the US. He has faith that the situations that lead to the widespread uses of the AK-47 will never occur in the USA.