Creeping Incrementalism
Member
While RKBA at its core doesn't have anything to do with hunting, the fact that certain firearms are "never used for hunting" is often used as a reason why they should be banned. The AK seems to be the rifle most often brought up in this context.
I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else, so I thought I'd bring it up with a thread here. In the 70s, even the communist Soviet Union provided AKs specifically for hunters. The KSU (bottom rifle) has a folding stock, and the barrel sure looks shorter than 16 inches to me. I found the following in Legends and Reality of the AK, co-authored by Val Shilin, who worked with Kalashnikov at the Izmash arsenal.
From Page 53 of the book...
And below are the pics I scanned from Page 54:
I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else, so I thought I'd bring it up with a thread here. In the 70s, even the communist Soviet Union provided AKs specifically for hunters. The KSU (bottom rifle) has a folding stock, and the barrel sure looks shorter than 16 inches to me. I found the following in Legends and Reality of the AK, co-authored by Val Shilin, who worked with Kalashnikov at the Izmash arsenal.
From Page 53 of the book...
Izhmash is a very diverse manufacturing company, producing not only military small arms, but civilian firearms as well. In the days of the Soviet Union, official hunters could make requests for development of new small arms in a process similar to that of the military. One such firearm is the “Tiger Carbine”, a civilian version of the SVD Dragunov. Less well known, though, is the Karabin Skladnoy (Ukorochennyi—Short Folding Carbine) that was developed at the request of professional hunters in Kazakhstan. The hunters had just concluded a contract with the government of Kazakhstan to kill and export the hides of a large number of Saiga antelope, an animal that is extremely abundant in Kazakhstan. Of course, the wholesale slaughter of antelope in the West would because a cause celebre for the animal rights activists, but not in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. At any rate, the hunters wanted a number of reliable semiautomatic 7.62x39mm carbines with high-capacity magazines. Because many of the hunters spent lengthy amounts of time out in the wild, some carbines were made up with folding stocks for convenient carry in the field. This version was designated the KSU.
Izhmash provided a small number of both versions of the semiautomatic carbines and then went back to exclusive manufacture of select-fire weapons. From the accompanying photos, it is clear that the KS and KSU are essentially semiautomatic-only versions of the AKM. As an aside, the reader will note that the 7.62x39mm cartridge, unlike the 5.56x45mm and 5.45x39mm cartridges, is an excellent deer and antelope round. Its terminal ballistics are on a par with the old reliable U.S. .30-30 cartridge, which has probably claimed more deer on the North American continent than all other calibers combined.
And below are the pics I scanned from Page 54: