AK 47 & C4
 

Someone help me with this. How can a Goat herder from the middle east afford that stuff?
Also I see on CNN the photos of troops with the butt plates on top of their shoulders. Damn a M-1 would have broke your neck.

Opium. Oil. Silence.

These things bring top dollar.

plus market saturation.. there's just so much of that stuff around that it gets pretty cheap.

Yeah, these weapons are not being assembled in first world shops. They are pouring out of China and the old Soviet bloc. A quick google reveals new Romanian weapons for < $400. I bet you can pick one up on the Arab street for next to nothing.

Plus, these guys aren't exactly going to TerrorMart and buying this stuff over the counter. It is being shipped in from Syria and Iran and handed out like free candy so that more infidels/members of the wrong branch of Islam can be dispatched.

rent the film The Lord of War.

A lot of them are not real AKs. Many are homemade. There are whole arms markets where people make guns.
Guns are like jewelry in the East.

You tax money at work. :(

How is an AK & C4 made and purchased in the Mid East my tax money?
Oh, I can make C4 in my kitchen if I want to... not that I would. You know they do the same over there.

Your tax money has provided great piles of these babies to the middle east, especially Afghanistan and Pakistan. AKs are a unique breed in that they migrate in herds and are long lived, even in the desert. ;)

confused..... I thought your constitution empowered the right to bear arms.....

...and that you were beholden to export your ideals & afore-mentioned constituion to where-ever.....

If we were more successful at evenly spreading the small arms around, genocide would remain a thing of the twentieth century, something like European religious wars being a thing of the seventeenth. A genocide can only properly get going when the target population is disarmed. Otherwise, it's a, um, less than terribly formal war. "We'll give a war. Nobody has to come; you're already here, so it's convenient."

Personally, I'd rather be afflicted by a war than afflicted by a genocide. Dry showers and people-ovens... ick. More better to turn rabid me-haters into tomato paste.