Over the years, two dozen nations have produced the rifle, including Warsaw Pact members, China, North Korea, Egypt, Iraq and Finland. Before his death in 2013, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was planning to open a factory to manufacture the gun, and the AK is wielded in battle today by al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and anti-government rebels in Syria.
No exact count is possible, but experts believe there are about 100 million AKs, modernizations and derivatives around the world, with as many as 1 million more being made each year.
In the United States, the AK and all other fully automatic weapons are illegal for most civilians. As a weapon designed for military use, an authentic AK can be switched between automatic and single-shot modes with the flip of a lever. The so-called assault rifles for sale in the United States are semiautomatic — that is, one shot per trigger-pull. Those seen blazing away in Hollywood movies are disabled weapons that can fire only blanks.