I was working for the National Rifle Association as curator for the National Firearms Museum, and I had just moved out of Washington, D.C., to northern Virginia. But I never forgot the AKs I had seen in “Red Dawn.” I wore out two VHS copies of the film from constant playing over the years.įlash-forward a decade to 1994. 308 rifle, purchased not long after I finished school. The closest I would get then to quick-firing any Soviet shoulder arm would be sending 7.62x39mm ammo downrange in a Vietnam War trophy SKS. were rare and somewhat available, but $1,250 for the new Steyr Maadi advertised in Soldier of Fortune magazine was more than I could hope to swing. While AR-15s were familiar to anyone that spent as much time as I did at gun shows, I didn’t have a Kalashnikov in my meager collection.
Looking back, the violence on the screen for that film was nowhere near what we get on network TV these days. One of the stranger things about the film was that it was the first PG-13 film released in America. But to see actual AK-47 rifles in the hands of teenage actors on the silver screen was something I hadn’t expected. I was used to seeing M1 Garands and M1 Carbines and I owned examples of each. I grew up with WWII television shows like Combat! always on the screen, and being part of a military family, I had spent five years out on bases on a small island in the Pacific-Okinawa. One of those guns sat next to me as I wrote this.
Enemy paratroopers falling from the sky, teenage boys and girls holding off Russian invaders, living off the land in the mountains of Colorado and, of course, the guns onscreen.