Right to bear arms and "free country" and all that..? Can I own one? No? Why not?

You frequently post interesting contributions to the discourse here, but the "jewspiracy" stuff is going to get deleted. Please stop.

Well the AK would be illegal under federal law along with all other automatic rifles unless you pay for a Class III tax stamp- although an SKS or WASR or other semi-auto Kalashnikov shouldn't be a problem in CA as long as you get a conversion kit for fixed magazine and don't have a bayonet lug, if I remember right.

YMMV though, CA has some pretty restrictive gun laws- isn't that why LA has so few gang shootings? ;P

Cheaper to buy a surplus Swedish Mauser, I say. Better rifle, better round, better price, vastly improved accuracy- and for you CA folks it's bolt-action with a fixed mag and wooden stock so it doesn't scare politicians by looking scary.

The AK-47 has to be made in a factory with stamping presses and mass production. This may lead to economies of scale and to little innovation; all AK-47s are the same.

The M-16, on the other hand, was designed to be built by CNC machines and won't get the mass production discounts, but it does mean that just about anybody can make them, and can make modified versions. Plus its modularity (the upper with barrel and sights and bolt carrier and firing pin is separate from the lower with trigger and hammer) makes it easy to mix and match interesting combinations and variants, so there are quite a lot of different kinds of M-16s in both caliber and barrel length and accessories. These do not lend themselves to cheapness.

The QWERTY keyboard as an example of "path dependence" has been well and truly debunked by the fellows who wrote Typing Errors: The standard typewriter keyboard is Exhibit A in the hottest new case against markets. But the evidence has been cooked.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html

An earlier look at the history, development, and optimization of the typing keyboard, by the same authors as the link Mona posted, is here:

http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

It's a little easier to read, in many ways, because it's more of an essay than a piece of journalism. It's a fascinating history of the development of the keyboard, and a look at the typing contests that helped popularize the QWERTY layout.

You make one rather large assumption in your article, which is that the AK-47 is actually inferior. That's a big one.

I was just reading a gun magazine a few weeks ago, and they rated the five best assault weapons of all time. The M-16 actually did pretty well, but number one was the AK-47.

Why?

First off, reliablity, reliability, reliability. If you need to shoot somebody, that damn weapon better work. Whether you've been low-crawling through mud and water, slogging through sand, or freezing your ass off in a blizzard. The weapon has to fire when you pull the trigger.

And the AK-47 does.

Add low cost, excellent stopping power, easy maintenance, and acceptable accuracty and rate of fire, and then you know why the AK-47 is on top, and likely to stay there.

No mystery about that at all.

I have one it's made out of steel. You can pound nails in with it or swing it and kill someone. No shit. I think it weighs 4lbs.

And oh, all militia weapons in Africa are cheaper.

One - they're really quite available. So you're just as likely to buy from someone who stole or looted it from someone else. I was once offered an RPG-7 round for about $7 American. No launcher.

Two - all guns are useless w/o ammo. AK standard ammo is all over the place. In Gaza for instance an M-16 round might cost 5x what an AK standard round costs. Ergo more people have AK's.

Thank you for that. The authors reference their "Fable of the Keys" piece in the Reason article; I wasn't aware that it was available online. (It was published in The Journal of Law and Economics.)

i don't type fast. but i type faster than i think. so any keyboard is good enough. i have heard people type who type really fast though. it is like rain on a tin roof. all the same length. it didn't matter if it is a "z" or a "j". so when good typists learn they learn in rhythm - the representation doesn't matter. it's the same for the AK47. if you are going to kill helpless civilians or not so helpless settlers, but from ambush, it doesn't really matter what kind of gun you use.

the three salon-carlin words. you can't use them. pussy cunt jew. but dinna ye fret, you can still use wuss dick zog, or the more plainspoken cowardly evil i$raeli (cf gordon wagner)

deleting posts(3) at whim. are you a follower of gordon wagner? or perhaps the Schoolmarm of the Western World? explain yourself.

In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied.

Interestingly Russia now appears intent on asserting intellectual property rights on the AK-47:

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070316/62123005.html

if alberto gonzales deletes emails - and emails referencing emails, there're demands to recall torquemada, but here? nada. not a peep. mr leonard doesn't *know* gordon wagner. RealName wasn't just blowing smoke. gordon often sounds like an unregenerate nazi - which is what provoked RealName. he's actually only a *secondary* nazi (like the secondary boycott). he deifies the arabs - and the jews are in the way! for the good of the renewal (of the caliphate) they must be run down, slandered, libelled. perhaps that's why he wants to know where he can purchase AK47's. but not even RealName objects! (or perhaps i missed that deletion). why? don't you care? doesn't *anybody* care? now the question...if no one cares, why should i?