Book Review: Guns don’t kill people, inventions do - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Book Review: Guns don’t kill people, inventions do

“The Gun” — two words, without the subtitle most nonfiction titles include — is by Pulitzer Prize winner and former Marine Capt. C.J. Chivers.

The gun is the AK47.

In a 21-page prologue, Chivers offers seven reasons his book is a “comprehensive account, not a complete account” of the political, military, industrial and cultural phenomenon of the Automatic Kalashnikova-47 assault rifle.

Not complete? It’s hard to fathom — or want, or need — reporting more complete.

“The book focuses on the most important series of infantry small-arms of our time,” the gun that became the “primary weapon of guerrillas, terrorists and many armed criminal gangs.”

In words, Chivers convincingly shows how the AK47 “enabled automatic firepower to reach uncountable hands.”

Nearly uncountable. “Serious estimates put the number of Kalashnikovs and its derivatives as high as 100 million.” This means “there could be one Kalashnikov for every 70 people” on Earth.

However, “The Gun” is no mere stockpile of statistics about the “stubby black rifle with a banana-shaped magazine, a steep front sight post, and a dark wooden stock.”

What makes “The Gun” readable is its humanity, including the plight of AK47-carrying Hungarian dissident Jozsef Tibor Feyes in 1956 and the plea of M16-carrying Lt. Michael P. Chervenak, who sees “too many Marines hiding behind a paddy dike trying to clear their rifle” in Vietnam.

Chivers wants to show a “richer context,” and he succeeds thoroughly. And under no pressure to get all the news into the first paragraph of an article, Chivers begins with 140 pages of perspective:

å Richard J. Gatling, whose 1862 gun provided “the armies with their first reasonably effective rapid-fire arm,” wanted to “invent a machine” that would “supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently exposure to battle and disease.” The gun worked, but the altruistic theory failed.

å Hiram Maxim, who gave the world the destructive Maxim (the machine gun, not the publication). Used in 1887 by a British force against tribes in Africa, reports say “not one of the hapless wretches that came out escaped alive.”

å In the battle of Somme, rows of British soldiers walked with bayonets affixed — “not the full madness of 19th-century close-order drill but it was close” — toward German machine guns; 21,000 British soldiers died in one day, and war-fighting changed.

By Armistice, “another question had moved to the fore: How to make automatic weapons smaller?”

After World War II, a new arms race began. Mikhail Kalashnikov finished first, official Soviet history says.

However, “any distillation that treats the AK47 as a spontaneous invention, the epiphany of an unassuming but gifted sergeant at his work bench, missed the very nature of its origin as an idiosyncratic Soviet product. The weapon was designed collectively.”

Where was the U.S. when the AK47 was making its debut?

“Throughout the 1950s, the United States had missed the significance and spread of Soviet and Eastern bloc small arms. ... Jolted alert by the Communist assault rifle’s large-scale arrival in Vietnam, the Pentagon realized in the matter of rifles it was outmatched.”

In response, the Army selected the M16 in a process marked “by salesmanship, sham science, cover-ups, chicanery, incompetence, and ... dishonesty by a gun manufacturer and senior American military officers.”

The Pentagon closed the “gun gap,” but “its unlucky soldiers and Marines would soon pay for it in blood” in Vietnam, where the M16 became notorious for jamming.”

In contrast, the successful AK47 became ubiquitous. In Afghanistan, some rifles bear stamps from 1953. In Africa, the continent of child soldiers, “AK” now means “Africa Killer.”

Globally, “no pariah seems far from his personal inventory.” In Osama bin Laden’s first post-9/11 videotape, a Kalashnikov is at his side.

“In another half-century, or century, the rifles will have broken, one by one, and the chance exists that they will no longer be a significant factor in war, terror atrocity and crime, and they will stop being a barometer of the insecurity gripping many regions of the world.”

But Mikhail Kalashnikov sleeps soundly. “I made it [the gun] to protect the Motherland. ... The negative side is that ... terrorists also want to use simple and reliable arms.”

J. Ford Huffman is a Military Times book reviewer.