THE GUN.

In a post a short while back, Reporter’s Notebook No. 2, I posed questions based on the photograph, above, of the factory and date stamp on a 1954 AK-47.

This particular rifle was more than a half-century old that day I made this picture, and it was not in a reserve armory or a museum. It was still in active use, and was carried on this day, a few years ago, by an Afghan soldier on a joint Afghan-American patrol in Ghazni Province. Can you think of tools that last this long, or that you expect to? Your pickup truck? Cell phone? Refrigerator? Television? Laptop? Do you own anything that was manufactured in the 1950s and still is in regular, active use in your life? Sure, there are examples. (The original toilets in older buildings are one; older electric lamps are another, although many antique lamps have been rewired by their owners, so maybe they don’t count.)  When set against almost all products, the list is not large.

A longer post about old rifles in recent Taliban service touched off discussions about firearms, durability, quality, fighting styles and fighting choices, and a list of other themes on At War, NPR, www.military.com, Ricochet, the Firearm Blog, and the Atlantic’s Daily Dish. 

Readers sent in replies. Here are two from people who agreed that their replies could be published on this site. The first came in under the subject line: “Musical instruments last longer than guns.”  It’s from Tim Gauhan, and it tracks with a similar point made by a commenter on Ricochet.

I own a lap steel guitar that was manufactured before WWII that plays and sounds at least as good as it did the day it was new and there are many, many similar instruments of the same age are still in use. In fact, most quality musical instruments made of wood actually improve with age if well maintained. I’m not an expert on violins, but I’d venture that at least 80% string instruments played in the world’s major orchestras predate the rifle pictured on your site - many by a couple of centuries!

It’s a bit unfair to compare hand made violins with mass manufactured
guns, but pretty much every electric guitar (my lap steel included)
ever made was made in a factory. Fender and Gibson brand electric
guitars from the 1950’s are extremely valuable today in large part due
to scarcity (guitars aren’t as tough as guns and won’t survive the
abuse guns are able to take), but also because they are damn fine
instruments that will continue to be useful damn near forever.

Finally, it’s much easier to kill someone with an electric guitar than
it is to make music with a rifle. The list of products that remain
useful for decades, even centuries is indeed short. But if that list
is ranked according to coolness, guitars come ahead guns every time.

Guns are intellectually and emotionally potent objects; people react to them in very different ways. Tim speaks from a point of view many people share. Some of you do not.  All of you are welcome here, no matter where you stand on the arguments — pro-gun and anti-gun — that sometimes drown out thoughtful reflections about firearms.

The next reply is from Tim Heffernan who sent an account from his college days.

As fer old machines still in use … A fine question. At Deep Springs we had 1943 International dump truck, still in its original Marine Corps green. Engine was an inline six that looked to be made of about four components, all iron or brass. All we ever did was add new oil to replace what it burned. Didn’t even drain it, just topped it off. It still ran like a champ; I once started it up on the first try on a -13 degree morning. And we hauled 80 tons of rock, over dozens of trips, 11 miles up a rough dirt road with it during a big building project. Verily, they don’t make them like they used to.

I’m headed back to Afghanistan for more work. I’ll look to make some fresh images of rifle stamps as time and opportunities allow, and will soon publish a post on At War about the rifles taken from the Taliban dead after an American infantry platoon’s ambush of insurgent patrol in RC-East last year.  One of those rifles, a Kalashnikov, bore an unusual factory stamp. I also have some images from inside the now defunct but once secret Kalashnikov assembly plant in the German Democratic Republic. I’ll try to get them up next week, too, though I expect to be very busy.

As for the 1954 AK-47, above, it’s not quite the senior. I have photographs of an older AK-47 in the hands of an Afghan police officer in Kandahar this summer. I’d post an image of it here, but I have promised its picture to Foreign Affairs, which will publish it later this year. Then it will settle in on this site.  And there are older AK’s out there, still. All of them were assembled here.