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If you agree with Freepers on most issues, you are making real progress.

Now: Since this is a thread about guns, and more specifically the Russian Avtomat Kalashnikov, and as I am a 60 year old linguist, scholar of things Russian, father of three daughters, product of university training and all that stuff...I will briefly address the gun control issue.

1. Get educated. Just one of many examples: Read Dr. John Lott on 'More Guns, Less Crime.' You need to have a solid knowledge base grounded in reality, since much of the elite media and popular press is profoundly ignorant of both the current and historic reality of the impact of gun ownership. Please note that those on the side of socialism, state police, big government solutions and the like...lie routinely. Start gathering information from Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, Gun Owners of America, etc. to balance the leftist mendacity.

2. Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the brilliant Russian writer, was a loyal Communist and Russian trooper in WWII. Arrested and imprisoned by the Stalinist regime, he once lamented that it was a tragedy that families being arrested in the middle of the night by stormtroopers had no means to resist. Tyrants love unarmed peasants.

3. Two universally true statements: Criminals will never, ever obey the law. They will always be able to get guns. Therefore, gun control is victim disarmament. (A corollary: if the only gun owner left is the government, that power will corrupt the government and corrupt it absolutely).

4. Nations which have gun control are either (1) Tyrannies, or (2) Experiencing an upsurge in crime (e.g. Britain and Australia). I choose to live in neither type.

5. At a personal level, I have taught my daughters to shoot. The option is to consider non-resistance. That option leads to victim status - do I really want to see them raped and strangled with their own pantyhose? Or kill a would-be rapist with a Sig Sauer 357? They and I prefer the latter, and like our AK designer in Izhevsk, will sleep better for it.

6. I have lived and worked in Europe. I speak the languages. It is difficult for those encapsulated in the socialist mindset of those societies to understand the risks they really face or the price of freedom. Both are high. I choose freedom. Please consider doing likewise.

7. And in parting, remember this. There are many, many of us in this fair republic of the United States who will never relinquish our guns. Never. Never. Nor will we ever register them. Never, Never, Never. Thus, it is an exercise in futility and an invitation to violence to deprive a free people of the right to preserve their freedom.