Is the 7.62 x 39 an American Cartridge?

No. It is a Russian cartridge that has mass appeal in the USA. It is a useful cartridge and we do an injustice to the designers by claiming it as “American”. Just as the 6.5 Swede is a Swedish cartridge, the 8mm Mauser and the 7mm Mauser are German cartridges, even though there are a boatload of Rifles so chambered world wide. The .303 British is absolutely British. The 9mm Parabellum was designed by Georg Luger and is widely used world wide, but it is a German cartridge, just as the .45ACP and .357 Magnum are American cartridges. The venerable 30-06 is an American cartridge that can be found world wide, but is still an American cartridge. It is about specificity and precise terminology and ascribing credit to where it belongs. All are great cartridges in their own right. Just sayin....

BigBore44 said:

Easy now. Leverguns are cool. However, I didn’t think so till I was about 30.

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"Easy now" yourself. Re-read my statements and understand.

I said these folks knew leverguns were cool, and they didn't know any better that the Win 94 and the 30-30 had absolutely nothing to do with the Winning of the West. I personally never had a time in my life in which leverguns weren't cool, but I never mistook the 94 for the legendary '73. Of course, it only took me a few years as a kid to learn the 3 M's of levergunning - Make Mine a Marlin.

As for the original topic at hand - I agree with the others, broad acceptance doesn't change origin. The x39 isn't an American cartridge, it's a Russian cartridge which is popular in America. Chimichangas are pretty popular in the US, so is Spaghetti... Neither are American cuisine...

Just because something is popular in America does not make it an "American cartridge". 45-70 is an American cartridge. 30-06 is an American cartridge. 7.62x39 is not an American cartridge and is never going to be an American cartridge. What next, 6.5x55 Swedish as an "American" cartridge?

Crowman said:

No. It is a Russian cartridge that has mass appeal in the USA. It is a useful cartridge and we do an injustice to the designers by claiming it as “American”. Just as the 6.5 Swede is a Swedish cartridge, the 8mm Mauser and the 7mm Mauser are German cartridges, even though there are a boatload of Rifles so chambered world wide. The .303 British is absolutely British. The 9mm Parabellum was designed by Georg Luger and is widely used world wide, but it is a German cartridge, just as the .45ACP and .357 Magnum are American cartridges. The venerable 30-06 is an American cartridge that can be found world wide, but is still an American cartridge. It is about specificity and precise terminology and ascribing credit to where it belongs. All are great cartridges in their own right. Just sayin....

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That, too.

BSA1 said:

If the country of origin always defines whether it is American what about the Hot Dog?

It can be easily deduced that the name frankfurter comes from name Frankfurt, Germany. It is here where sausages served in a bun originated.

Baseball was America's favorite sport for several generations and still remains very popular (especially with the NFL controversy). You would probably get a big argument (and maybe a black eye) to say that having a dog while at the ball game is not an uniquely American tradition.

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The bun part, and served at Coney Island, and Baseball, and backyard cookouts . . . made the hot dog American.

If a cartridge is a hot dog, a rifle must be the bun. The Russians already had millions of buns for the 7.62x39 before we started using American buns for that cartridge.

If it hasn't already been mentioned in this thread, do any of y'all remember the 7.62x39 being called the 7.62 Russian Short? I bought boxes and boxes of Russian Shorts in the early '90s.

A case can be made for hot dogs but this ain't about hot dogs or baseball. The millions of AK's in use around the world kinda dwarfs the cartridge's use in the US. It's not like we're using it in our own guns. Most the guns in use in the US that chamber the cartridge are AK's or SKS's. Most of the ammo shot out of them is also not of domestic manufacture. Let's be real, the cartridge would not be anywhere near as popular as it is if it weren't for dirt cheap foreign milsurp ammo. Most people who buy them now are feeding them steel cased Tula. So if we're mostly shooting foreign ammo in foreign rifles, there's really very little "American" about it.

Changing a name does not change the country of origin. A brat, a mett, a sausage, whatever, calling it a hot dog doesn’t change anything. Although I’m not sure where they originated, calling French fries freedom fries certainly didn’t make them American.

As mentioned above, most people are still shooting Russian steel in their AK’s and SKS’s, so how American is that?

The only thing American about it is our willingness and ability to try new things. The fact that they started out cheap certainly didn’t hurt. Same for the 7.62x54, cheap Mosins will never make that cartridge American, despite Winchester and Westinghouse making guns to fit it a hundred or so years ago.

It's as American as the AK-47

If we hadn't been flooded with cheap SKS's and cheap surplus ammo....the x39 wouldn't be popular at all.

I have a couple of 5.45x39's , an AR and an AK74. Only because I have thousands of rds of 7n6 Russian ammo I bought for about a nickel a rd a dozen years back. Cheap to shoot, so I have the guns. Otherwise I would have passed on the 74's.

I'd say it's neither a good cartridge nor an American one. It was at one time a cheap one. But the guns that went with it are quintessentially un-American - hunks of junk for ignorant and untrained peasants that might hold 8 MOA from a machine rest on a good day. That's the polar opposite of the accurate and functional rifles American (and many other first world nation's) troops have been equipped with for the last 100+ years.

In terms of the cartridge itself, it has too large a bore for too small a case capacity to be a good military cartridge. The trajectory sucks and the armor penetration sucks and neither can be fixed by changing the load. Hence why the Russians had to phase it out at great cost. As a hunting cartridge it's merely handicapped by the guns and the fact that it has little if anything to offer relative to the .308.

Yes, the 7.62 x 39 is an abject failure compared to a round that came 8 years later with much larger case capacity. And also as a big-game hunting round for which it was never designed.


Thanks for pointing that out. No wonder it has been so wildly unsuccessful all this time...

The 7.62x39 sucks as traditional rifleman's round, but it was a great intermediate round for a fighting carbine, and still is a solid choice for CQB given its surprising close range barrier penetration.

I bet it would be a lot more popular than it is if not for import restrictions and other regulations on its guns and ammo.

chicharrones said:

If it hasn't already been mentioned in this thread, do any of y'all remember the 7.62x39 being called the 7.62 Russian Short? I bought boxes and boxes of Russian Shorts in the early '90s.

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Winchester if I remember right. Came in a white box with black lettering.

tubeshooter said:

Thanks for pointing that out. No wonder it has been so wildly unsuccessful all this time...

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It was a failure as a military round - ineffective against armored opponents (fails to penetrate level III type plates even at PBR, while M193 let alone M995 slices through them easily) and with too big a diameter and too little case capacity to fix that by just adding a penetrator. That left the Russians only expensive and unreliable solutions like sabots thereby forcing them to change rounds. The various comblock countries replaced 7.62x39 and surplussed all those those junky guns for a reason.

Llama Bob said:

It was a failure as a military round - ineffective against armored opponents (fails to penetrate level III type plates even at PBR, while M193 let alone M995 slices through them easily) and with too big a diameter and too little case capacity to fix that by just adding a penetrator. That left the Russians only expensive and unreliable solutions like sabots thereby forcing them to change rounds. The various comblock countries replaced 7.62x39 and surplussed all those those junky guns for a reason.

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Who was widely issuing rifle plates decades ago?

The Soviets changed rounds mainly because with the advent of 5.56, they were about to lose their riflemen's volume of fire and controllability advantage they'd previously held over their battle rifle armed NATO counterparts.

Heavier, larger diameter bullets have their advantages, especially in forest and built environment where penetration of possible cover from wood to cinder blocks is a consideration. Unsurprisingly, most candidates to replace the 5.56 NATO are getting ballistically closer to 7.62x39. Some of the 5.56's strength, velocity advantage, has been lost with current M4 14.5" barrels. Some details of the upcoming Army Small Arms Ammunition Configuration Study have already leaked out and they seems to indicate that Mk318/Mk319/Mk262 ammo with heavier bullets were mostly band-aid to improve its terminal ballistic performance and the M855A1 has accelerated the barrel and bolt head wear dramatically.

Personally I'm not in a position to choose one over another and I don't even want to. I'm quite happy that my service rifle is chambered in 7.62x39 for situations I may encounter if a crisis emerges. I can effortlessly put a full magazine of rounds into a palm-sized group at 165 yards with open sights, just like (tens of?) thousands other marksman-qualified Finnish reserve officers/NCO:s/soldiers. With measurably better non-armored barrier penetration, which is a much more likely obstacle between the shooter and the target than the relatively few parts of the body covered with ceramics and aramid/kevlar. For anything armored there are plenty of shoulder-fired can-openers available if need be.

BSA1 said:

The 7.62 x 39 is cartridge designed in a Communist country and has and still is used against American soldiers many times. Yet despite this history it has become a very popular cartridge in the United States.

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Why should that matter? I thought we (gun owners) were supposed to be the side that understood that a machine can't be evil, it's the person using the machine that makes good or bad decisions?
*scratches head*

BSA1 said:

If the country of origin always defines whether it is American what about the Hot Dog?

It can be easily deduced that the name frankfurter comes from name Frankfurt, Germany. It is here where sausages served in a bun originated.

Baseball was America's favorite sport for several generations and still remains very popular (especially with the NFL controversy). You would probably get a big argument (and maybe a black eye) to say that having a dog while at the ball game is not an uniquely American tradition.

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Weeeelllllllll, actually the German / Austrian Frankfurter Würstchen is a thin parboiled sausage made of pure pork in a casing of sheep's intestine that has been slow smoked at low temperature. Prior to eating, Frankfurters are not cooked; they are only heated in hot water for about eight minutes which prevents the skin from bursting; whereas, the quintessential American Hot Dog is served skinless and may contain chicken, beef or turkey. "Skinless" hot dogs use an inedible casing in the cooking process when the product is manufactured, but the casing is usually a long tube of thin cellulose that is removed between cooking and packaging. This process was invented in Chicago in 1925 so it seems that true Hot Dogs are American after all, just as Frankfurters are German. They are different.

Crowman said:

Weeeelllllllll, actually the German / Austrian Frankfurter Würstchen is a thin parboiled sausage made of pure pork in a casing of sheep's intestine that has been slow smoked at low temperature. Prior to eating, Frankfurters are not cooked; they are only heated in hot water for about eight minutes which prevents the skin from bursting; whereas, the quintessential American Hot Dog is served skinless and may contain chicken, beef or turkey. "Skinless" hot dogs use an inedible casing in the cooking process when the product is manufactured, but the casing is usually a long tube of thin cellulose that is removed between cooking and packaging. This process was invented in Chicago in 1925 so it seems that true Hot Dogs are American after all, just as Frankfurters are German. They are different.

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I'm glad you cleared that up.

Llama Bob said:

The various comblock countries replaced 7.62x39 and surplussed all those those junky guns for a reason.

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Yes, the reason was that Russia was supplying those countries with arms and Russia phased out the AK-47 and the 7.62 x 39.

The countries in the Soviet Union (USSR), relied on Russia for arms and ammo. The 7.62 x 39 was phased out around 1974 when the USSR was still intact. Russia had full control of USSR armament during the years of the Soviet Union and developed the 5.45 x 39 to replace the 7.62 x 39. So those countries you speak of weren't communist bloc countries as we know them today. They were part of the Soviet Union run by mother Russia. Some of those countries never had an arms industry and still don't today. They buy their weapons and ammo from the Russians. Russia is the second largest arms exporter in the world by a large margin. They even export their ammo to the US. It's a huge part of their GDP.

The 7.62 x 39 cartridge immigrated to the US and has become a good citizen .

7.62x39 was never really phased out of Russian service, it's still in use as as an alternate standard and they likely still have more AKMs in their inventory than the total number of M16s ever produced.

They've also developed new service ammunition for it fairly recently in the form of the 7N23 round.

In fact they continue to develop new and updated rifles in the caliber, with the A-762 and AK-15 being two of the latest examples.