Top 10 Kalashnikov Quotes & Sayings

Talk about tactful - she's got a tongue like a Kalashnikov!

My aim was to create armaments to protect the borders of my motherland. It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well-known in the world; that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the designers. Man is born to protect his family, his children, his wife. But I want you to know that apart from armaments, I have written three books in which I try to educate our youth to show respect for their families, for old people, for history.

Everywhere I went on my job covering conflict, the Kalashnikov was the predominant arm.

Mindless violence, well let me try to paint it. Here's the 5 steps in hopes to explain it: 1, It's me and my Nation against the World 2, Then me and my Clan against the Nation 3, Then me and my Fam against the Clan 4, Then me and my Brother, we no hesitation Go against the Fam until they cave in 5, Now who's left in this deadly equation? That's right, it's me against my Brother Then we point a Kalashnikov And kill one another.

Certainly the automatic Kalashnikov's ease of use and durability make it desirable for all sorts of people up to no good. But rifles are rifles - there are many other choices out there. You see the Kalashnikov almost everywhere there is fighting because there are so many of them.

When I went to Afghanistan in 2003, I walked into a war zone. Entire neighborhoods had been demolished. There were an overwhelming number of widows and orphans and people who had been physically and emotionally damaged; every 10-year-old kid on the street knew how to dismantle a Kalashnikov in under a minute. I would flip through math textbooks intended for third grade, fourth grade, and they would include word problems such as, "If you have 100 grenades and 20 mujahideen, how many grenades per mujahideen do you get?" War has infiltrated every facet of life.

It appears that the murder rate inside prisons is ten times higher than that outside prisons. It must be due to all those Kalashnikov rifles that are issued to prisoners upon their incarceration.

Actually, in a lot of circumstances, the Kalashnikov is poorly used by people who are not especially good shots, or who are outright bad shots. In these cases, the rifle's weaknesses emerge. As far as accuracy goes, the Kalashnikov is stubbornly mediocre, and the ease with which it can be fired on automatic means that many people fire it on automatic when they would be better served firing a single, aimed shot. Getting shot at by a sniper is a much different experience, and far more frightening. But either experience is, to borrow your word, memorable. These memories are pretty much all bad.

For many observers, a child who has known nothing but war, a child for whom the Kalashnikov is the only way to make a living and for whom the bush is the most welcoming community, is a child lost forever for peace and development. I contest this view. For the sake of these children, it is essential to prove that another life is possible.

The automatic Kalashnikov is a tool, an implement designed for ordinary men, without much training or undue complications, to kill other men, and to be used in the conditions in which wars are often fought. But it's only a tool, and while its ready availability in many unstable lands can be seen as kindling violence, this is not simply because of the weapon's qualities themselves. It is because of the quantities of the weapons that have been made.