April 26, 2012
By Marco Vorobiev
Russia's Ministry of Defense intends to destroy 4 million guns by the end of 2014
Marco Vorobiev was a member of the elite Soviet Spetsnaz in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He's a U.S. citizen now and conducts training courses that draw on his special forces training. He'll have a new installment every Wednesday.
The Russian Ministry of Defense intends to utilize (read destroy and melt down) 4 million older model guns by the year 2015. These will be pulled from the stockpiles of estimated 16 million guns that are no longer in service with Russian Armed Forces. Roughly 6.45 million of these guns are no longer serviceable.
Though the types were not officially announced, a little birdie whispered to me that most of the guns slotted for destruction are Mosin rifles and carbines, SKS carbines, Nagant revolvers, TT33 Tula Tokarev pistols, a huge number of AKM automatic rifles, RPK and RPK-74 light machine guns and a small number of older PK medium machine guns.
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The Ministry of Industry and Trade is planning to send these guns to the factories where they were produced for disposal. Apparently this would keep in business plants like Molot and create 240 jobs. Meanwhile, Russia's biggest arsenal Izhmash, had to suspend its destruction program after misplacing approximately 80 AKM rifles.
I don't know about you, but I can come up with a much better idea for disposal of these guns: Send them over here! We would even pay for them. But unfortunately this will never happen. So, millions of guns, including some of the truly historic firearms, will be sent to the crusher instead.
Brand-new AKM rifles Some the guns slotted for destruction are brand-new AKM rifles. They arrive at the plants in their original crates still covered in grease. The same factory that built them will destroy them.
Stripped barreled actions Stripped barreled actions then are loaded into the crates and transported to crusher. Vorobiev says both fairly new and historic arms will be destroyed to preserve jobs at arms plants.
Smaller components The smaller components such as trigger groups, bolts, magazines, etc., are sent to the smelting plant. This box contains SKS trigger groups and bolts, Mosin-Nagant bolts and Makarov magazines.
Smelting plant At the smelting plant, the guns effectively end their lives as guns and start anew life as car parts, or just steel ingots bound for China. Here you can see a PPS-43, SKS and some old double shotguns.
