The manufacturer that makes the popular—ubiquitous—Kalashnikov rifle is filing for bankruptcy. The problem is that the Soviet Union granted basically any socialist country a license to produce the assault rifle in order to make “freeing the people” easier. After the Soviet Union fell, the licenses were effectively null.
Except everybody kept making the guns. Most of the places where the AK is made do not entirely respect property rights, and since the gun is so effective and cheap to make—well, you see the problem. But what if we could take AKs off the streets of Mogadishu? (And the Pashtun heartland? And Chechnya? Etc, etc) Well, for one, it’d make COIN operations a whole lot more easier if there wasn’t a limitless stock of the best assault rifle ever made just waiting to be used in every conflict zone in the world.
So the United States should buy the rights to the Kalashnikov, and then pursue all the copycats with lawsuits! OK, so that wouldn’t exactly work. But local solutions to the small arms trade should be pushed wherever possible. It’s one thing to supply weapons to the side we prefer (like the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia). But we should also work on keeping guns out of the hands of insurgents, too—and that means taking on the manufacturers of the copycat Kalashnikovs.
