![](\"http:\/\/madairsoft.com\/images\/TM_AK47.jpg\")
\n…of the “Avtomat Kalashnikov<\/em>” model 1947 assault rifle, people think “marxism”, “revolution”…<\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/media.ebaumsworld.com\/picture\/wetbutter101\/itswhattheprosuse.JPG\")
<\/p>\n
…or “gangs of teenage thug “militiamen” here for your stuff”.<\/p>\n
The AK47 is one of the iconic images of the past 100 years. More than 100 million AK-series rifles have been built – the vast majority of them serving the militaries of totalitarian dictatorships, he private guards of warlords and thugs, and “revolutionary” groups around the Second and Third Worlds from the 1950s to today. It’s the AK-series (colloquialized as the “AK-47” in the US, although it covers the vastly more-numerous AKM, the more modern AK-74 and others) that served everyone from the guards at Red Square to the Viet Cong <\/em>to the militias of Mogadishu. The AK was romanticized by the American left (Che uses ’em!) and then, as the Cold War wound down, demonized (so do the Crips!).<\/p>\n It developed a substantial mythology that largely obscures the political and social aspects of its design; designed to be rugged and easily maintained by illiterate peasants, it is not an accurate rifle; it’s designed for badly-trained people to spray automatic fire in your general direction, to scare you away, or to keep your head down long enough for someone to throw a grenade at you. It is the very antithesis <\/em>of the American tradition of marksmanship. The west never developed a counter-icon with the counter-culture romance of the AK – indeed, since so much of the survival of the west involved refuting the idea <\/em>of the romantic totalitarian hero, that’s completely appropriate.<\/p>\n But if the west did <\/em>have a counter-icon, it’d likely be the FN-FAL:<\/p>\n Designed and built at Belgium’s Fabrique Nationale<\/em> (FN), the Fusil Automatique Leger<\/em> (“Light Automatic Rifle”), or “FAL” served the west from the mid-fifties until the present – although it’s been falling out of front-line service with the west’s militaries for the past 15 years or so. It’s big. It’s powerful – unlike the AK with its short 7.62x39mm “intermediate” round, it fires a full-powered 7.62x51mm round (known as “.308 Winchester” in the US).<\/p>\n The big difference? It’s accurate in a way the AK never could be. It’s a marksman’s rifle; while it could <\/em>spray automatic fire (at least in its Belgian version; the British and Canadians adopted a semi-automatic only version, the “SLR”, from 1957 through the mid-eighties), it was way too light to use as a machine gun. It’s rugged like the AK, but it wasn’ “simple”; where the AK was a cheap specimen that could be manufactured in any third-world machine shop, the FAL was the product of old-world European craftsmanship, painstakingly machined to fairly tight tolerances.<\/p>\n And yet, in battle after battle around the world for fifty years, when the forces of “revolution” and thuggery took to the field with their AK47s, they were as often as not faced with troops with the FAL. As the USSR and NATO stared each other down from the fifties through the ’80s, many of the NATO troops that stared back across the border – the Dutch, the Belgians, the British and Canadians and many others – carried the FAL.
\nBut I’m not going to write about the AK.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/hornscustomrifles.com\/pic\/6-2005\/00-1000-016.jpg\")
<\/a> D<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nAs did the US – almost:<\/a><\/p>\n