Duct Tape, Hell: The Care and Feeding of Your AK-47
Written: Apr 23 '03 (Updated Apr 23 '03)
Product Rating:
Pros: Classic, sensible discussion of mechanics, history, and impact: essence of distilled Long
Cons: Induces panic in liberals
The Bottom Line: Worthy of a place on any bookshelf, as a manual, a stylistic tonic, a laconic history, and a guide to the most important small arm in creation
mshawpyle's Full Review: Duncan Long - Ak47: The Complete Kalashnikov Famil...
As I have pointed out in reviewing the estimable Duncan Long’s work on the Ruger .22, it is a tonic experience to deal with a work on firearms that refrains from hysteria and is cleanly and elegantly written. Long’s text on the AK-47 and its variants and knock-offs is just such a work: as, considering the source, we ought have expected.
Traditionally, a Duncan Long guide to any firearm operates on several levels.
Firstly, it is a primer on the weapon, its uses and its mechanics, its care and control, and still more on the issue of competent and proper ownership, in which safety is above all things paramount.
Secondly, it is an important historical source, tracing the development of the weapon, the human history behind it, and its impact upon the world, which, in the case of the AK-47, is very significant indeed.
And thirdly, each of Long’s volumes is a useful resource for writers, on the analogy of the volumes on wills, ballistics, poisons, criminal procedure, and the like that the folks at Writers Digest put out for the inky wretches of the film and fiction trades.
I need hardly say that Duncan Long on the AK-47 is thus, in keeping with these qualities that run through all his work, a thing of severe beauty.
Long is, always, precise, laconic, and wry in his approach. He writes, as always, with the greatest technical exactitude about the specs and the glitches, the human factors and the bugs.
He also employs admirable and idjit-proof schematic diagrams that are, alone, worth the price of poker.
And he is a well of common sense, spiked with subtle humor, in insisting at all times upon – and advising how to achieve and ensure – lawfulness and safety. As he aptly points out, in what was, after all, a pre- 9/11 passage when written, the most important accessory any owner of an AK-47 in a civilized land can purchase is a carrying case that does not advertise that you are walking around with an AK-47. The great god Pan may be dead, after all, but Panic fear lives on within the species.
Back when I was in college – which I know some of you will think was some time between the days of Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Roger Bacon – I had a professor of politics whose specialty courses included such arcana as a (highly select) seminar on Strategic Intelligence and National Defense. Himself an OSS veteran whose war-bride was an Austrian noblewoman, he had thereby ended up with cousins-in-law (across the border) on the West German General Staff; one of whose mots he loved to tell his advanced students, to the effect that Cousin-General Fritz had set forth, as the Bundesrepublik’s wish-list for any future war, ‘British uniforms, American rations, Soviet weapons … and the Italians on the other side.’
The ‘Soviet weapon’ that Leutnant-General von ––––– had in mind was, assuredly, the AK-47, and its influence has been far-reaching indeed. Long’s volume is even more impressive, and absorbing, than usual in his survey of the weapon’s history, and its influence, not least in its influence upon other designs. Even the Israelis have seized upon some of the AK-47’s design elements.
Most of all, of course, the AK-47 (with associated Kalashnikov designs, all likewise given the attentive treatment Long does so well) has become a weapon of first resort for tribes as well as terrorists, for goons and for guerrilleros. It’s the Lee-Enfield of our day, and not a day goes by without one’s being used by someone somewhere in one of the world’s ‘bad neighborhoods.’ Consequently, Long’s sensible and thoroughly researched analyses are of great importance to everyone who wants to understand the world as it is, and afford a very handy pocket resource for the historian.
But, of course, the work may be at its best as a guide and manual, and as an example, that could be studied with considerable profit by any writer, of how the laconic and the precise can make a prose of startling clarity and sinewy strength.
On all these counts, I commend this volume to your attention, whether you’ve ever heard a shot fired or not.
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