My AK-47 (Saiga): A Love/Hate Relationship

The Tale of the Katrina Gun

So I had been considering getting back into shooting after years away and had not yet decided on the one weapon that could do everything: protect the house, play at the range, shoot for pennies, have a bit of character, and most importantly - catch my fancy.

There were so many things to mull over, I just could not make up my mind. New or Used? Civilian or Milsurp? Rifle or Carbine? (I had ruled out shotgun only cause they are kinda boring at the range). But with all the research, I had not made a decision.

Then the Katrina disaster hit us all. Day after day a major US city was left to its own. People without protection were looted, people with protection were not. True, as my wife pointed out, those who could go did and we would have gone too. But I knew that being able to leave was just a novel feature to this disaster, in most there is no warning and no simple, planned escape.

If anything BIG happened, Katrina was a lesson in just how alone and screwed we were all going to be.

So I just went down to the nearest large gunstore and searched the racks. While I have a real soft spot for military surplus, nothing there that day really was both in good shape and terribly affordable. I also wanted a really available, cheap round, so the enfileds were out (I also have always found them bulky). The SKS's are not all that light either and I have never liked their stocks - the grip is just too fat.

Then I saw the strangest AK I had ever seen. Night black, sporter stock, short magazine, AK receiver, but just rifle enough to pass the wife's "What's THAT?" test. It also felt better in my hand than the Romanian AK next to it and was much lighter feeling. Add that all to being in great condition, and sporting the super cheap 7.62x39 round and the plastic was on the table.

Now, I need to add that I love the sloppy perfection in idiot-proofing that is the AK. I have shot my fair share of AR-15/M-16's and they have never felt right to me. I really can't explain it, except to say that I like clugey hacks, and the AK is a legend of cluginess that works like perfection.

Anyways, one Russian AK clone and 200+ rounds of ammo in the minivan and I was on my way home.

It did pass the wife test, barely. But nothing much would, so mission accomplished there.

After many trips to the range, I will say this about the rifle: it is reliable. 700+ rounds later and I can only report one jam, and that with a soft point round so I stopped using soft points. This reliability is remarkable since there are gaps in the gas tube, the magazines are essentially plastic, and the rifle is as cheap as they come.

The down side is that it is not very accurate. I have tried the original sights which are so poor they cannot be seen by anyone over 25. I have tried a red dot scope which was worse than the original sights. I have tried Mojo Peep sights which helped alot but are no good over 60 yards or so. And I have tried magnifying scopes (better but still not great).

Could this thing hit a deer? Sure. Could it hit a man? Sure. Could it win a fight against a well armed, determined attacker at 100 yards? Not likely at all.

But then again, does it need to? No, not really. It has a limited magazine (10 rounds) and was intended to get around assault ban restrictions. It was intended for hunting. It was intended for guys who could not realistically own a real AK (either failed the wife test or the government test).

Worse yet is that the BATF has very stringent rules for this particular rifle. Although it is easy to do, and the parts are openly sold, I cannot use a magazine with a higher capacity than the 10 round ones sold with the rifle. And even though folding stocks are sold (and this would greatly improve my closet space situation), I would be a criminal if I installed one on my rifle. Basically, all the cool mods that you can put on other firearms, you cannot on this one. It is as it is, and cannot be changed.

So, do I keep it? For now, yeah. Why? Because I cannot afford to replace it. And also because I really do like the mechanisms involved. You'd have to look inside one to understand what I mean. The really are an impressively simple design.

So, until I can get a Polish Underfolder AK with Synthetic stocks, I guess I will have to keep this as my Katrina gun.

It will just have to do...

When Do Ends Justify Means?

We liberals are funny people. Sometimes we are soft to denounce the terrible actions of others, while finding as many possible actions of our own that can be labeled as being terrible. It is a weakness of ours that the right smells on us and exploits at every turn. Face it; we liberals have a habit towards moral relativism that is something we must be aware of and work against all the time.

At the same time, the very same right loves to talk about absolute truths of right and wrong until those truths are inconvenient. The "Party of Life" ain't so full of points of light when it comes to communists, liberals, terrorists, arabs, scary looking people on the street, or traitors. The list of people they are willing to "waive" absolute truth for includes Americans as well as non-Americans and is long enough to make their Jesus weep. They are not so much moral relativists as situational moralists.

But the reality is that both groups are faced with a serious and difficult question. In a nutshell, what do we do with people who want nothing less than the absolute destruction of Americans (in the world or just in the middle east - does not matter) and relish in the harm and brutality that they can inflict?

The volume on this question is high. With Americans literally being beheaded on TV and our safety in the balance, the answer is hard to calmly come to. BUT IT IS VITAL to remember that volume does not change the nature of the question. The question is absolute (REALLY absolute - not CONVENIENTLY absolute!):

Do the ends justify the means?

Some have answered the question in a simple fashion: the ends are bunk so the means are unjustified. This is answer given by McCain and others who point at the lack of meaningful information gathered by the use of torture. Torture elicits confessions and admissions that are for political ends, not useful in any tactical way. At best we could have Osama on the TV admitting the error of his ways and begging forgiveness of the masses with a bruise on one eye. But does this justify torture?

The problem with this answer is that it begs the question, "If the ends WERE valuable, THEN would any means justify them?" I.E. If pulling out some jihadist’s bowels while he watched elicited the location of a nuclear weapon, then his torture and murder would be ok? By this argument, maybe it would be.

Another group argues that the means cannot be justified because in the end it is we become what we hate. I.E. even if we use the means, and the enemy is destroyed, we have become something else, something worse. The ends of the war move the nation to an end that itself is unacceptable.

The classic problem with this is that if we let the enemy get to far, maybe there will not be a future for us. Would it be better to be dirty or dead, the argument goes. This is an easy argument to make, but only if the enemy really has the capacity to inflict this kind of end on us. Do they have thousands of nukes pointed at us? No? Hmm...

And yet another says that the ends justify the means because in their means, they have absolved us of ours. In other words, they lose rights to the Geneva Convention when they act as stateless terrorists. They lose their American rights the first day at the Pakistani Jihadi training camp. “They want a war, we will give it to them.”

But this does not hold in any other field. When guards storm a hostage situation where the hostage taker raped a bank teller, they do not hand cuff him, drop their pants and begin the payback. No, there is some sense that our laws hold despite the actions of criminals, terrorists, and even traitors.

So when do the ends justify the means? When are they, even the most extreme ones acceptable? And is their acceptability based on their extremity?

Once at a dinner party, I posed the question, "If you could end all warfare in the Middle East by taking a 4 year old from the dinner table out in the street and putting a bullet through his head, would you?"

Considering the table was full of Israelis and American Jews, this was not as academic a question as you might think.

I posed it in part because I though people were not being absolute in their condemnation of terrorism as well as others being too accepting of the use of inexact munitions in targeting known terrorists.

So, again, do the ends justify the means?

The first group I mentioned might say that children aught not be killed, or even risked since we cannot be sure that we will get to the target we want. But what if we were sure the bad guy was in the car with his family? Would it be worth it? What if he was alone, but on a crowded street? If the end is that tantalizing, does the justification come only with the accuracy of the missile or the information gleamed from the water boarding?

The second group has its own problems. If a single life could stop the horror, isn't that easy math? Really. Doesn't the father lose the right for his kid’s safety if he chooses the life of terror? Hell, won't the kid just grow up to be a terrorist anyways? What if just a few slaps, or even just the threat of a visit to room 101 could save our own kids? How could you not?

The last group ends with the moved end point. Once we do this, we cannot be who we were before. But, so what? I mean, we all weep for the loss of the Indian nations, but we are glad to be the ones running the country, right? Hey, a little sin with a whole lot of life is survivable, ain't it?

So, finally, does the ends justify the means? Are there absolutes in this world anymore, or are we all just relativists, either the moral relativists or situational moralists? Are we all just confused and lost? Have we already lost who we were, never really having any strong moral backbones to begin with?

So I leave you with the question: You have the gun, you have the 4 year old, and peace could be possible.

Do the ends justify the means?

How do you know?

Learning from the Airlines: School Shooting Solutions

Two more tragic school shootings have made the headlines and terrified each and every parent and student in the nation. While most honest coverage of these events has made clear that the attackers were not students, much of the reports have spent time on the problem of gun violence in the nation and how disarmament would help move us all to safer schools. And yet, while reports are willing to opine and wander into areas of political discourse, they are seeming squeamish at reporting another part of these two shootings: the choice of schools as targets by violent rapists.

Let us be clear, in both cases the attackers had two goals: sexual abuse of young kids to be followed by murder and suicide. Like suicide bombers, these two killers chose schools as the softest targets that held the highest number of their potential victims. The first chose a public school, the second chose an even softer target: a religious pacifist school.

In both cases the attackers entered unopposed, set up defenses, chose their victims and began their sexual abuse before the police could arrive. In both cases, negotiations were meaningless since the police had nothing the butchers wanted. The butchers had the weapons, the young girls, and time to commit heinous sexual acts before killing themselves and taking a few children with them.

Let me also be clear, these two cases are unusual and the police handling of the events seem to be fully appropriate and even heroic. In both cases they had hostage situations with armed and well-blockaded perpetrators with a classroom full of kids. In both cases they had to storm tactically difficult rooms and surely saved lives in the process.

The problem is that the police could only arrive after the attack had begun, the victims carefully selected, and the barricades put up. There was no one who could give meaningful opposition in the critical opening moments when the attackers were most vulnerable. As per the now national norm, kids in other classrooms were put into lockdown and huddled into "safe" locations until the police arrived. This helps slow down attackers, but does nothing at all to stop them. Trust me, any classroom door can be opened by a breaching shotgun (but I digress here).

Who could have reacted in the initial moments of the attack? Only those who are in the school: Teachers, Principles, staff, or visiting parents. A security guard is preferred, and a police officer is even better, but if he is sick that day or on the opposite end of a large campus, he is not going to be able to make the difference. And most schools have neither.

When it became painfully obvious that our cockpits were a soft target for terrorists, we soul searched and decided to make three key changes to harden them. First, we actually hardened the doors on the cockpits to slow the terrorists down. The "lock down" plans in most schools accomplish much the same goal. We also hired police (marshals) to ride the planes and be there to thwart attacks even though they would only be on a few flights at any one point in time. Perhaps more schools will now hire armed guards, time will tell. But the last element has been that we have allowed, certified, trained, and professional pilots to carry firearms themselves and provided them with the means to save themselves, the people on their planes, and the people on the ground. Could we not even consider doing the same for our schools?

But wouldn’t guns in schools mean accidents, hurt kids, bravado, and the collapse of western society! (Ok, that last one was over the top...)

The same was said of the pilots and yet no accidental shooting has occurred. No pilot has blown out a window while showing off his "six shooter" in a moment of braggadocio. No pilot has let a kid play with his gun and shot the family pet. No pilot has sat down, farted, and killed grandma with an accidental discharge. No pilot has helped solve a drunk and disorderly passenger situation by putting a gun in the jerk's face. And no pilot, to my knowledge, has gotten in an argument with his co-pilot and shot him in a drunken rage. Nope. Never. Not a one.

Instead, the quiet skies have been just that: quiet. Too bad our schools aren't.

So, can we please have an open and realistic debate about how we can harden our schools? Against student attackers, against hostage takers, against suicidal rapists, and God forbid, against the future possibility of suicide bombers. Schools are increasingly a target of opportunity. They are unarmed, unlocked, chaotic and filled with our most precious treasures: our children.

Hoping them safe has not worked. Making them free of any and all firearms has not worked. Disarming the entire nation has not worked (even in placed that are nearly disarmed). And expecting the police to protect us has not worked (again - no insult to the police intended).

Perhaps our schools can learn something from the airlines...