Jeremy Clarkson on AK-47

“Design is rarely art because design, when all is said and done, exists purely to make money. And yet the AK was never designed to do that. In fact Mikhail Kalashnikov lives today on nothing more than a Soviet Army pension. And that's why his most famous creation can be called an art form. And that's what gives it soul.”

“Once, while I was working in Switzerland, a Hell's Angel offered me a brand-new AK47, still in its greaseproof wrapping paper, for £300. He would have even thrown in a thousand rounds of ammunition for good measure. 'Here,' he said, 'try it out.' And so I did, firing at a railway sleeper maybe 60 yards away at the bottom of a quarry. The effect was astonishing. The bullets smashed the sleeper into two pieces that ended up ten feet from one another. So much, I remember thinking, for those Hollywood heroes who say 'ow' when they're hit.”

“Then you have Che Guevara, possibly the coolest man ever to have walked the planet. Yes, his real name was Earnest, but he managed to make James Dean and Steve McQueen look like a couple of nancy boys. I loathed the man's politics but I loved the T-shirt. Even his beard worked because you knew it wasn't grown for any of the usual reasons- vanity, laziness or insecurity. It was grown because he lived in a wood and there was no water with which to shave. There are people today who spend a fortune trying to look good, but he managed to look better using only a beret and a boiler suit. I bet he had a lot of sex. I bet he also had an AK-47.”

“The AK is different. There are children in the world today named Kalash, in its honour. You will find images of it in national emblems. And closer to home, the only private number plate I've ever even half considered buying is 'AK47'. I think it would give my Volvo a bit more cred. So what's the deal then? Why does the AK rise above all the heat and pieces? Why has it got soul when, undoubtedly, the others do not? Well, it was born amid unimaginable strife and suffering so it has genuine working-class, hard-man origins. And unlike Cilla Black, who bangs on about her harsh Scouser upbringing from the luxury of her Thames-side mansion, the AK has never sold out. You never find an AK in the pampered hands of an American solider, boasting about how it was brought up in a cave in Saigon. It was born to help the underdog and that's what it's been doing, non-stop for nigh on 60 years.”

“Kalashnikov had already distinguished himself by inventing a device that counted the shells a tank had fired and now, as he recuperated from his wounds, he set about designing something that could rival the Germans' MP44. A hand-held sub-machinegun. Something that came to be known as the AK47. It wasn't actually read, as the name implies, until 1947, two years after Hitler's penis had been buried under the Kremlin, but that didn't stop it becoming by far and away the most successful gun in the whole of military history. No patent was ever taken out, which meant anyone with a foundry could set up shop and make one too. And they did. AKs were produced all around the world in such vast numbers that so far 70 million have been sold. And that in turn means that one person in 90 across the whole planet has got one. And as a result of that, it is said that the AK47 has killed more people than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Think of any conflict since 1947 and it's a fairly safe bet that at least one of the sides has been using AK47s. The warlords in Mogadishu, the Vietcong in Vietnam, the Republican Guard in Iraq. This half-timbered gun has been a 50-year thorn in Uncle Sam's side.”

“Interestingly, however, it doesn't actually do anything especially interesting. You get a 30-round magazine that fires normal 7.62mmn ammunition at a rate of 600 bullets per minute. That gives you enough ammo for a three-second burst, which is about average. And there's nothing unusual about its range either. Reckon on 1,100 yards or so. In fact it even has a few design defects, like it weighs nearly 10 lbs. That doesn't sound like much but you trying carrying it around all day, in a jungle. Then there are the sights, which are too far forward on the barrel. But worse is the safety switch. To get it from 'safe' to 'single shot' you have to go through the 'fully automatic' setting. And as you move it, it gives away its Russian origins, and your position, by going 'clack.' So there you are, trying to ease off the safety for a nice, clean shot. But as you do so the target hears the mechanism and fires. You then fire back only to find you're in fully automatic mode and that you've missed. So why then, if it's heavy, flawed and nothing special, has it been such a hit? Well, the simple answer is its simplicity. In a competition to find the least-complicated machine ever made, it would tie in first place with the mousetrap.”