Why the US military should make the AK-47 its standard

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The answer to that is both simple and obvious: Because it is the best!

Let's face it, when you are going into combat, when you are going to be facing opponents who are similarly armed with some sort of automatic assault weapon, you want the very best automatic assault weapon in the world.

When your life is on the line, you want to be driving a Ferrari not a Ford.

That's what your family would want for you.

And the very best general purpose automatic assault weapon on the planet is the trusty old AK-47. The jury has been in on that for a long time. The voting has been done by men,..and women, who bet their lives on it.

Even during Vietnam War, and that was 50 years ago, a many a GI was happy to get his hands on the trusty AK-47. It didn't jam so much. What would you pay for a gun that didn't jam so much when you're out in the jungle?

Since then it has been adopted by about 50 countries, and every gangster, terrorist, revolutionary and mercenary that is not so beholding to a particular national capitalist group that he isn't free to chose his own weapon, has chosen the AK-47. We don't even have to have that debate.

Therefore if the rulers of our military really lose any sleep over the safety of our troops, as they claim, they should "bite the bullet," seems the appropriate phrase, and arm our soldiers with the best. They can make it here, maybe they can even make it better, but they should license it from Russia or China or do whatever they have to do to make it legal and pay due respect to Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947, more commonly referred to as the AK-47.

I don't think it was an accident that Mikhail Kalashnikov invented this weapon, just as I don't think it was an accident that his legendary weapon was invented so soon after World War II in Russia. Mikhail Kalashnikov was a brilliant gun designer and he was in a position to synthesis those extremely hard won [12 million military dead in USSR] lessons of infantry combat under some of the most extreme environmental conditions. He understood how to make it simple and he understood how to make it work.

Mikhail Kalashnikov was also a poet. He died today, age 94.