Designer of AK47 Assault Rifle Dies At Aged 94

The designer of the AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifle that has killed more people than any other gun in the world died today aged 94 after a long term heart-related problems.
Mikhail Kalashnikov, who was in his 20s when he created the gun just after World War Two, died in his home city of Izhevsk, near the Ural Mountains, where his gun is still made, the Russian state news agency Intar-Tass reported.
Born in 1919, Mikhail was the seventeenth child of well-off peasants. When he was eleven, during Joseph Stalin’s purges his parents had their land confiscated, and the whole family was exiled to Siberia.
As the country began to prepare for World War Two Kalashnikov chose to go into a tank brigade. There he was allowed to create several modifications – a tank shot counter, a running time meter – that were to be adopted for the whole Red Army, and made him famous.

Kalashnikov’s own career as a tank commander was cut short in the first few months of the conflict on the Eastern Front, when he was injured in the shoulder by a shell. Kalashnikov says the idea for the AK47 came to him as he recuperated in hospital.

But the invention of the AK-47 was not a Eureka moment, but a trial-and-error process of modifications and improvements undertaken by a team over six years.
His design was based on several principles that had already been seen in British, Russian and Italian weapons to which the inventor had easy access as he drew up his blueprints. Its main precursor was the German StG 44, the first truly effective automatic weapon of World War II.

He wanted to make it a simple to use and function as possible so it could be used in harsh Russian conditions and maintained easily by soldiers in the field. His idea for the AK-47 was that it would not be a weapon designed for accuracy but to be used for close quarter fighting.

It was easy for a novice to fire and strip down to clean which led to its enduring legacy over 60 years on. At a lavish Kremlin ceremony on Kalashnikov’s 90th birthday, then-President Dmitry Medvedev bestowed on him the highest state honour
An estimated 100 million of his easy to use and assemble deadly weapon are now thought to be spread worldwide.