Americans Aren't Scooping Up AK-47s Like They Once Did

The rifle that helped define 20th-century warfare doesn't seem to be Americans' go-to anymore. The New York Times' Thomas Gibbons-Neff reports that civilian AK-style rifles, once relatively inexpensive and widely available, have largely vanished from US shelves, squeezed by geopolitics, economics, and changing tastes. His piece is somewhat anecdotal; he doesn't share figures beyond quoting a National Shooting Sports Foundation stat that 30 million "modern sporting rifles" (the AK and AR-15 fall under that header) have circulated in the US since 1990. But as Jim Fuller, dubbed "one of the godfathers of the [American] AK market" by Gibbons-Neff, puts it, "all of a sudden there was nothing."

Some of that comes down to cost—both the gun and its ammunition have grown pricey—and some is due to shifts abroad, with manufacturers stymied by tariffs (in the case of one Polish manufacturer), sanctions (in Russia's case), or increasingly focused on supplying Europeans who wish to arm themselves against a potential Russian threat. A rifle that might have cost a few hundred dollars in the 1980s can now run into the four figures, with ammunition also far more expensive as Ukrainian forces compete for the same calibers. That's pushed many shooters toward the cheaper AR-15, leaving US importers and a few manufacturers scrambling to keep the AK's niche alive. Read the full piece here.