WITH as many as 200 million in circulation it is the modern world’s most plentiful and efficient killing machine. Had he been alive, its inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov would have been 99 last week. David Pratt reflects on the bloody legacy of his famous rifle.

HE said his name was J-Boy and he was 14 years old. It was a stiflingly humid, rainy day in the midst of civil war in the West African nation of Liberia when I met him back in 2003.

Along with a few other boy soldiers, J-Boy was guarding a makeshift checkpoint on the Po River bridge some 8 miles or so from the Liberian capital Monrovia.

High on cocaine and alcohol and heavily armed, the boys were in an unpredictable, volatile mood and hell-bent on extorting whatever they could from terrified civilians fleeing along the road from nearby fighting.

Clearly wary of our presence as journalists, my driver offered the boys cigarettes to try and relax the situation before myself and a colleague began chatting with them.

Like most boy soldiers J-Boy had a swaggering, boastful air and carried his assault rifle like some totemic macho badge of honour. Had he himself ever killed anyone? I eventually asked tentatively.

“Oh sure man, plenty, plenty,” he replied, grinning widely, his eyes scarily unblinking. “With this good AK, it’s way easy, killing,” he assured me, slapping the assault rifle in his lap while speaking Kreyol, the English-based pidgin spoken by many people in Liberia.

It was a disquieting confession, one I had little doubt was true. The AK he was referring to of course was the AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947) automatic rifle, or ‘Kalashnikov’ as it’s more commonly known throughout the world.

It’s been said that the Russian name most often uttered across the globe is not Lenin, Stalin or Putin, but Kalashnikov. The reason is depressingly simple, for there is estimated to be as many as 200 million Kalashnikov rifles in circulation worldwide, that’s almost one for every 35 people.

The Kalashnikov is not just any gun, but a brand name that straddles continents and is as familiar as Coca Cola. With its distinctive banana curved magazine clip, the rifle's familiar silhouette is part of modern iconography.

Mexican drug cartel gunmen boast about their cuernos de chivo, or “goat horns,” because of its curved magazine. In Lebanon that same silhouette has made its way onto the flag of the Islamist Hezbollah movement while in Mozambique it features on the country’s coat of arms.

In other African countries, the shortened form ‘Kalash,” has even become a boys’ name. In Britain meanwhile there is a well known racehorse named Kalashnikov, while its cultural symbolism has found its way into movies like Jackie Brown by Quentin Tarantino where black market arms dealer Ordell Robbie played by Samuel L. Jackson, praises its effectiveness for “when you’ve absolutely, positively, got to kill every mother****** in the room”.

The reality of the Kalashnikov of course is anything but glamorous. It is, in effect, the modern world’s most plentiful and efficient killing machine, an infamous utensil of death.

Had he been alive today the weapon’s designer, former Second World War Russian tank sergeant, Mikhail Kalashnikov, would have been 99 years old last week. How ironic it is that Kalashnikov himself was born almost a year to the day, 10 November 1919, after the signing of the armistice on November 11 1918, that ended the First World War.

No firearm of any kind has killed more people than the Kalashnikov. In the 71 years since its first prototype was made, the AK-47 has dealt death to millions. Every year, small arms kill between 20,000 and 100,000 people in the world’s conflicts with the Kalashnikov accounting for a high proportion and quite possible the majority of this human toll. Kalashnikovs make up more than one in ten of all firearms globally.

Despite having been around weapons for most of my working life, I’ve always felt acutely uncomfortable by their presence. On a point of professional and ethical principle countless times I’ve declined the chance to hold or be photographed let alone fire a weapon. It only makes an already difficult job more complex when reporters, non-combatants, are seen to be shouldering any kind of arms.

Only once have I broken this cardinal rule back in the 1980s in the remote mountains of Afghanistan.

“Shoot, shoot, mister Daoud!” insisted the Afghan commander of my guerrilla hosts for the umpteenth time, as we sat one day watching his men train at a remote camp in a craggy valley in the Hindu Kush mountains.

With his holy warriors looking on, the commander slotted a full clip of the boat-tailed bullets designed to give more accuracy into a Soviet-made Kalashnikov and thrust the weapon towards me.

There was an uneasy pause, but judging by the looks of the fighters around me, this had simply boiled down to an issue of initiation and acceptance, a very Afghan thing about loyalty and brotherhood. To refuse my hosts now would have made my presence at best uncomfortable, and at worst, untenable.

I explained that I would do this one time only, that no photographs should be taken and that he must never ask me to do it again. The commander gave me his assurance and after only minutes of instruction, a battered plastic bottle was set up some distance away as a target.

As I squeezed the trigger and the first rounds cracked against some rocks reasonably close to the bottle, the gawping bearded guerrillas who had clustered around began to grin. It wasn't a question of them ever expecting me to fire in earnest, just about passing some strange communal ritual.

In the event the experience was to prove instructive, for the ease with which I was able to handle the rifle made me realise why the AK-47 had gained its reputation as a so-called “user-friendly” weapon.

I realised too why it had become the firearm of choice among mercenary suppliers and illegal arms dealers, who know that those who end up shouldering this oddly toy-like weapon - which fires 600 rounds a minute, each powerful enough to punch a hole through a person’s chest from 100 yards - will have had little or no proper military training. Or, put another way, it is ideal for everyone from Afghan peasant farmers to school-kids-turned-killers like J-Boy in Liberia or some marauding civilian gunman in an incomprehensible blood lust in a shopping mall.

So robust and simple is the Kalashnikov that quite literally it’s a gun that child soldiers can take apart and put back together in 30 seconds.

While not especially accurate the gun’s controls are unsophisticated with plenty of clearance between it moving parts meaning no matter how clogged it gets with Syrian dust or Congolese mud its mechanism is unlikely to jam and those who use these weapons like such reliability.

The Kalashnikovis a weapon for “the small-statured, the mechanically disinclined, the dim witted, and the untrained,” observed former US marine turned war correspondent CJ Chivers in his remarkable book The Gun: The Story of the AK-47.

It is a weapon, he notes chillingly, that allows “ordinary men to kill other men without extensive training or complications”. So durable is the gun that as a reporter in Afghanistan in 2008, Chivers saw an AK-47 stamped with the manufacturing date of 1954, something I too have similarly witnessed.

Currently some 200 different types of Kalashnikovs are now produced in at least 30 countries and vast quantities of the weapons have turned up in trouble spots all over the world for decades, especially in Africa.

Hundreds of thousands of them disappeared after the breakup of Yugoslavia frequently ending up in the hands of terrorists and criminals. Most of the Kalashnikovs used in the Paris attacks at Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theatre were purchased in Belgium and traced back to the Balkans.

Recently too the war in eastern Ukraine against Russia-backed separatists has led to the uncontrolled spread of Kalashnikovs throughout the country.

“Ukraine has turned into a supermarket for illegal weapons,” says Heorhiy Uchaikin, who heads the Ukrainian association of gun owners, and estimates that Ukrainians now illegally possess as many as 5 million firearms the majority Kalashnikovs.

“In Ukraine, a gun is like shoe polish in a shoe polish factory,” Uchaikin recently observed.

If ready availability makes the Kalashnikov ubiquitous, so to does its cost. According to a report by Global Financial Integrity, which monitors illicit financial flows, procuring an AK-47 on the black market depends on a number of factors, notably the further it travels.

In Afghanistan, the gun could cost as little as $600 while on Mexico’s northern border with the US, the price would increase to $1,200. In Belgium where the Paris Charlie Hebdo perpetrators obtained their Balkan Kalashnikovs, it has a price tag of about $1,135. An authentic model would cost $1,200 in Pakistan but a locally produced model can be obtained in the country’s frontier bazaars for as little as $148. It is also possible to obtain an AK-47 through the darknet where costs typically range from $2,800 to $3,600.

The independent research group Small Arms Survey based in Geneva points also to the fact that cheaper weapons prices lead to an increased risk of civil war, independently of other conflict risk factors.

Countries with more porous borders tend also to have lower weapons prices. This is especially the case in Africa, where such borders allow the supply of weapons to meet demand more readily.

The Survey says that in Africa, Kalashnikov prices are the lowest in the world and falling. Income, regulatory effectiveness, war legacy, and supply cost variables all lower the price of weapons, but even controlling for these factors, being located in an African country makes purchasing an assault rifle around $US 200 cheaper than the world average.

During years of working across the African continent, I have stood on many dirt airstrips watching Soviet-era cargo planes being loaded up with crates of grenade launchers, ammunition and Kalashnikovs much of which often appeared to have been beneath the radar deliveries with little in the way of accompanying “paperwork”.

“African conflicts are wasteful of weapons ammunition and are always in need of more. The guys who carry this stuff in are just flying truck drivers,” Alex Vine who has intensively researched the arms trade and today heads the Africa Programme at Chatham House once told me.

He has a point. Back in 2003 just before I encountered J-Boy in Liberia I flew into the capital, Monrovia, on the second humanitarian aid flight ever to have reached the country since the upsurge of the civil war a few weeks before. The aircraft was flown by a group of volunteer pilots who told me that days earlier, coming in to land on the first aid flight, they had almost collided with an unscheduled incoming cargo plane.

“Later we found out it was flying in ammunition and guns for President Charles Taylor, which some people said was coming from Libya,” the Swedish pilot told me.

“It's always the same across Africa, you never know who is flying what.”

One member of the same pilot's own crew even admitted to having “ferried a few Kalashnikovs and bullets” in his time.

Illegal trafficking in small arms and light weapons is estimated to be worth $1.7 billion to $3.5 billion every year, equivalent to about 10 to 20 per cent of the legal arms trade. With over a million Kalashnikovs still produced annually, one of the world’s foremost killing machines is set to remain at the centre of the global arms trade for decades to come. Today the Kalashnikov continues to kills more people each day than all the world’s tanks, warplanes and ships combined.

As a servant of communism, Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died in 2013, made no money from his invention. Had he been a capitalist as well as a master gunmaker, he would have been a billionaire.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called the Kalashnikov “a symbol of the creative genius of our people.”

The weapon that made Kalashnikov a 'Hero of the Soviet Union' has also appeared on t-shirts and vodka bottles, featured in videos and song lyrics and been re-fashioned in crystal - a gift from Putin to George W. Bush.

Before his death in 2013 however, the designer of the world’s most famous rifle expressed more than a few regrets about what he had given the world.

“I am proud of my weapon… but I wish I had invented a machine which people could use, which could do good, for example, a sowing machine,” said the peasant's son from Siberia. Unfortunately that will never be and sadly as child soldier J-Boy told me that day on the bridge in Liberia, “With this good AK, it’s way easy, killing”.