Increased lethality, for instance, was usually attained by increasing the weight of the firearm and bullets, which often reduced reliability and mobility, and made weapons too expensive to outfit an entire army. The problem was that the various qualities of a good handheld weapon were often mutually exclusive. Benjamin Franklin famously advocated the use of bows by the cash-strapped Continental Army, arguing that they were cheaper, easier to use, and could send more arrows per minute than the musket could fire balls. Early muskets and their predecessors had slow rates of fire and poor accuracy and reliability, and thus did not always ensure battlefield superiority over arrows, edged weapons, and hand-launched missiles. But in reality, centuries of technological stagnation followed the invention of the first gun: for example, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “Brown Bess” flintlock musket remained almost unchanged during its use by the British Empire over the course of more than a century. Since gunpowder is not static in power in the way that human muscle is, once fiery arms were invented in the fourteenth century, they would in theory constantly improve in a way that bows, slings, and swords could not. In fact, the weapon is so reliable, effective, and easy to use by untrained operators that its advent made it widely possible for just about any group, even with little money, modern technology, or formal military training, to mount significant, deadly assaults against a much larger and more advanced force - a fact that has transformed the face of warfare and created a revolutionary romance that still surrounds the weapon. The AK-47 has succeeded so wildly because it is almost an ideal realization of the personal firearm: where most weapons have had to contend with tradeoffs between accuracy, lethality, speed of fire, reliability, cost of production, and ease of carrying and use, the AK-47 managed to find a sweet spot maximizing these traits. And it continues to play a major role in warfare today, most visibly in guerrilla conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, far beyond its utility, the AK-47 became a Cold War icon, appearing on revolutionary flags, in songs and poems, and in televised insurgencies as proof of communist fervor and supposed martial superiority. Created by a Soviet weapons designer at the dawn of the Cold War, it was mass-produced and distributed worldwide in the millions, leading to its canonization in the revolutionary Third World of the 1950s and 1960s. No firearm in history has enjoyed the fame or popularity of the assault rifle known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov.
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