Quoted:
I was so surprised when I read this article in the Washington Post of all places.


Dressed To Kill
From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot

Quoted:



I was so surprised when I read this article in the Washington Post of all places.
Dressed To Kill



From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot
By Stephen Hunter



Washington Post Staff Writer



Monday, November 26, 2001; Page C01
You won't see guns like that carried by the Taliban, no sir. Look at Osama bin Laden's gun. It's visible in any of a dozen pictures and it's tubeless, screenless and grenade-launcherless. But it, too, is not only a gun. It's a gun with a coded message; you can read this guy like a book.
He's certainly no Captain Winters from HBO's "Band of Brothers," who, despite his natural genius for soldiering, insisted on carrying the line soldier's prosaic M1 all the way to Berchtesgarten. No, bin Laden's narcissism –– dead giveaway to a fake tough guy –– mandates that he make a fashion statement.
Any idiot knows that was an AK-47 leaning against the cave wall behind bin Laden during his videotaped response to the American bombing. Yes, the AK-47, the most famous of the liberation firearms distributed globally by the Soviet Union and its client states during the Cold War. There may be 50 million of them floating around the globe today.
Except it wasn't. But if you're one of the idiots, don't feel bad; you belong with the other 99.9 percent of the population that doesn't know anything about guns. Bin Laden's rifle wasn't an AK-47 at all, but one of its descendants, an AK-74, and of a particular modification that included, for portability and ease of handling, a very short barrel and a folding skeletonized stock and a flash suppressor. It's called a Krinkov.
It's actually a hybrid. If you crossed a classic 7.62mm x 39 Soviet AK-47 with an American 5.56mm NATO M4, its natural antagonist in about a million firefights in about 75 wars, insurrections and special-ops tiffs, you'd get the AK-74, which is the AK-47 mechanism reconfigured to fire the smaller-caliber, high-velocity round. Then you trick it up; by cutting the barrel and adding that folding stock, you get a Krinkov, which is the current hot lick among people who want to be noticed. It was designed for airborne troops. If you're not going to be jumping out of airplanes, it doesn't do anything for you that the 47 won't.
Bin Laden knows this: For him the gun isn't just a weapon, it's a symbol. He's making a statement, as with the curved ceremonial dagger that hangs from his belt when he's all duded-up in his white finery. He is making a claim: I am of the elite. In other words, he is saying something so Western it suggests the soul-deep depth of his hypocrisy. He is saying: I am so cool.
http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-218439.html