K var used to be the place to look

i wouldn't waste money on funiture. Do you bring flowers to a strip club? AKs are bad  guy guns used by commies, terrorists, revolutionaries and criminals. Buy mags, ammo, a good two point sling and chest rig.

I bought a SAR-1 new for $ 350. I beat that thing like it owed me money. I'd much rather have an AR, but if I was running (or waddling) for my life I'd take an AK and a chest rig if I had to.

I've been reading The Gun by  C J Chivers, which is about the AK, and machineguns in general. These are guns from a hold my vodka and watch this society. It's a tough gun for vicious thugs. The Soviets couldn't make decent shoes or refrigerators but the knew how to make a carbine that wouldn't jam when shooting at fleeing East Germans.

The commies put Kalashinkov and his family in a camp, after killing their livestock and burning their house down. His father died in a blizzard, they couldn't bury him right away, so they put his corpse in a cold room in their drafty hut. Kalashnikov sat outside the door  imagining he could hear his father singing.

He was wounded in WW2. He was in a truck with some other wounded soldiers. They stopped at the edge of a town and kalishnikov and two other men scouted the town. They returned and found the rest of the Soviet soldiers had been captured by Nazis. The real story is that they probably hid and saw their comrades machine-gunned. Kalashnikov and the other two soldiers vomited when, after the Nazis left, they came out to check on their dead and dying friends

Kalashinikov made a machine pistol in a machine shop while recovering from his wounds. He was sent to a regional commissar to show him the gun. They took his gun and belt and threw him in jail. He was released a few days later. The machine pistol wasn't a great design but it wad impressive that he made it and Kalashinikov was sent to work under a weapons designer. These are guns made by, and for, rotten murderous assholes. It's an ingenious design built around an intermediate cartridge when NATO was still obsessed with full power rifles. But fancying it up is like duracoating a Harbor Freight electric drill