As we have seen, the first SKSs to appear in the US were "bringback" souvenirs from Vietnam. The Simonov carbine remained a rare collector's item or war trophy until the late eighties, when it first reached the American commercial market in serious numbers.
(At least one source claims that a small number appeared on the US market in the late fifties. Here the author must interject a personal note: I was an avid shooter and collector of military weapons during that period, within the possibilities of a teenage budget, and I spent hours poring over the ads in every issue of the gun magazines - and if anybody ever offered the SKS for sale, I missed it. Consequently I am somewhat skeptical of this claim; but if it is true, the number must have been small indeed.)
Two historic developments - one very big, one so small it came down to a single word - made the difference. First was the normalization of trade relations with China, which of course resulted in a tidal wave of imports of all sorts and created huge changes in the US retail business picture.
The other was a 1987 bill called the McClure-Volkmer Act, which revised certain aspects of the monumental 1968 US Gun Control Act. In its original wording the GCA had virtually outlawed the importation of military-type firearms, though it specified that "the Secretary [that is, the Secretary of the Treasury or his delegate, meaning in effect the Department of the Treasury] may authorize the importation of a firearm that is of a type that is generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes."
The McClure-Volkmer Act, among its many other provisions, changed "may" to "shall." That was enough; the doors were wide open and the imports came flooding in.
One of the biggest sources was China North Industries Group, aka Norinco. Norinco exported a tremendous quantity and variety of firearms and ammunition, much of it purposedly made for the US market, from .22 target rifles to combat pistols; but one of their most popular items was the SKS, which they produced in a bewildering series of models. The original version, though, was essentially identical to the standard Chinese Type 56 military rifle, complete with folding bayonet.
The first variations seem to have been the work of a US importer rather than Norinco; Midwest Ordnance, the story goes, modified some SKSs by shortening the barrels to 16 1/2 inches and removing the bayonets, and when this proved a popular item Norinco began making them at the factory. This abbreviated version was widely sold as the "Paratrooper" model, and quite a few unwary aficionados bought it under the impression that it was a special bit of military hardware; but in fact the Chinese never issued this or any other special SKS to their airborne units - it was purely a commercial creation.
There was also a model variously called the Type 84 or Model D which used a detachable magazine, similar to that of the AK-47. This attracted a certain amount of negative attention and some states outlawed it.
Contrary to legend, there was never a full-automatic version of the SKS. The Type 68, a selective-fire weapon made for the Chinese military, resembles the SKS in outward appearance and has some of its features, but the mechanism is completely different; it was never legally exported to the US, but a few examples may have made their way by illegal channels, and these may be responsible for the stories about full-auto SKSs.
In any case, the SKS quickly became a very popular item with American shooters and sportsmen. It was handy and easy to shoot, it didn't require much maintenance, it was powerful and accurate enough for hunting up to deer-size game, and best of all it was cheap. There were cheaper rifles on the market, now that military surplus weapons were coming in again from overseas, but these were mostly bolt-action rifles, which Americans have never really taken to. The Norinco SKS offered the less affluent American a chance to own a semi-automatic rifle, of a type suitable either for sport or personal defense, at an affordable price - and the ammunition was cheap too.
Vietnam veterans remembered its reliability. Rural people liked its ruggedness and its compact design, which fit neatly into a pickup rack or a saddle boot. Brush-country deer hunters liked its quick handling and the ability to deliver quick followup shots, while its limited range reduced the risk of accidents from stray bullets. More affluent shooters who already owned expensive sporting rifles bought it as a knockabout gun, for rough conditions or to carry in the trunk; if it got damaged or stolen, the owner wasn't out all that much.
And there's no denying that a lot of the more extreme far-right "survivalist" and "militia" types, while not entirely happy about the carbine's Communist origins, bought it with visions of some day blazing away at Black Helicopters or mowing down the non-white hordes; or that a certain number of macho-man Rambo-wantabees liked it because it made them feel tough and dangerous. People do buy otherwise valid things for bad reasons; box knives for example.
For whatever reasons, the Norinco SKS flood was bidding fair to become a tidal wave. The market was getting swamped; the American gun companies were starting to worry.
Political pressure was building, too, as antigun activists and others warned against the influx of "assault rifles." In 1989, the Treasury Department's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms division used the "suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes" language as a rationale for barring a long list of military or military-style makes, and came up with a list of features which would put a firearm on this list and disqualify it for import purposes.
The chief concern at the time was with more modern weapons such as AK-47s and Uzis; the SKS was not on the list, and it possessed only one of the proscribed features, the bayonet. Which had never featured in any violent crimes, and for that matter a good many SKS owners had removed the bayonet in the process of "sporterizing" the piece; but nevertheless, the following year President George Bush (Senior) signed an executive order specifically prohibiting the importation of the SKS with bayonet, and of the Model D with its detachable magazine.
Norinco was undeterred; they simply deleted the bayonet and its attaching lug and went on selling the SKS on the American market. By now they were pushing for the sporting and utility market; the so-called "Paratrooper" model was fitted with scope-sight rails and advertised as the "Cowboy Companion" while a full-length model, equipped with target-type sights and a 5-round magazine, was sold as the "Hunter."
Meanwhile a lively industry had developed, making aftermarket parts and accessories for the SKS. Sporting-type stocks, often made from synthetics, appeared in many styles, as did add-on sights and scope mounts; gunsmiths advertised fine-tuning work on the Simonov's notoriously stiff trigger pull. In 1990 detachable high-capacity magazines began to appear, designed to be substituted for the stock fixed magazine; these were generally unreliable, and of dubious legality depending on where you lived, but enough people bought them to keep the trade alive.
In May, 1994, however, President Clinton issued an executive order banning the importation of all Chinese-made firearms and ammunition. This had nothing to do with domestic gun-control issues, but was intended as a trade sanction against the Chinese government for human rights abuses. (Clinton at the same time agreed to renew China's "Most Favored Nation" trade status, to the chagrin of human-rights advocates; possibly the Norinco ban was meant to deflect criticism.)
The American firearms commmunity was generally outraged, with the obvious exception of those involved with the big gun companies. It was rather amusing to hear right-wing gun enthusiasts bitterly denouncing the President for denying them their right as God-fearing Americans to help support a Communist government....
Plenty of Norinco carbines were already in the US, though, and people continued to buy and sell them - at somewhat higher prices than before - and even now it's not hard to find one for sale. But they are no longer as popular, because better alternatives have arrived.
As far back as 1987, a US company tried importing a small batch of Yugoslav SKSs. Nothing much came of it, that being the year of the Norinco invasion; the Yugos were sold but there was no followup.
Later, though, changes in the laws and in the international situation caused American importers to look once again at the vast potential mine of outdated small arms lying idle in Eastern European arsenals. In 1991, right after the initial crackdown on the Norinco Simonovs, Congress amended the 1968 Gun Control Act to allow the importation of obsolete military surplus firearms from the former Communist nations of Europe.
This would have been irrelevant to the military SKS, since as a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bayonet it fell under the ATF's prohibitions. However, there was a loophole. The Federal laws have long recognized a category called "curio and relic": firearms whose principal value or interest is as collectors' items rather than as weapons. The exact criteria are complex and not entirely clear - the ATF, like most bureaucracies, maintains a certain degree of vagueness as a matter of unofficial policy - but, for present purposes, enough to say that the SKS eventually was added to the list.
The Clinton administration made a trade agreement with Russia allowing the importation of surplus firearms and ammunition. Ex-Soviet SKSs began to appear on the US market. They had bayonets, but that was OK because they were sold as "curios and relics" - which the Norinco Simonovs, being of modern commercial manufacture, were not. Thus a bizarre situation began to develop in which an SKS with a bayonet might or might not be legal, depending on where it came from and when it entered the country.
Since the same administration had recently cut off the SKS supply from China, the Russian surplus carbines got an enthusiastic welcome, especially since they turned out to be much better made than the Norincos. Large shipments were brought in and found a ready market, though never in quite the same numbers as the Chinese models.
Unfortunately it didn't last. Relations with the new Russian government were uneven; there was also the inevitable outcry from the hoplophobe activists over the importation of more of those wicked "assault weapons." At one point all munitions imports from Russia were banned. Eventually, in 1996, a new trade agreement was reached which allowed the importation of many Russian-made gun products - including 7.62x39mm. ammunition - but specifically excluded certain firearms, including the SKS.
Ever since, the SKS supply has fluctuated greatly. Shipments from various countries appear on the market from time to time, and are bought up; a recent batch of Albanian SKSs, for example, was gone from the importer's warehouse in short order. Prices went up accordingly; the SKS was still relatively inexpensive compared to a commercial sporting rifle, but for several years it could not really be called cheap.
The big breakthrough of recent years has been the arrival of the Yugos. Large quantities of the unique Yugoslav SKS have been imported and sold on the US market, and the supply doesn't seem to have run out yet. Often beat-up, invariably soaked in cosmoline, the old Yugoslav carbines aren't as pretty as the commercial Norincos, but the workmanship is first-class and the prices have been incredibly low, somewhere between one and two hundred dollars at the present time. The Yugos have restored the SKS to its bargain-basement status and have been responsible for a new wave of enthusiasm for the Simonov carbine.
The Yugo does present some interesting problems, legally. Besides the bayonet - a peculiarly nasty-looking one - it also incorporates several other Evil Features: a grenade launcher, night sights, and a threaded muzzle. All quite legal because it's on the Curio & Relic list; but the ATF's position is that the Yugo retains its C&R status only as long as it remains in "original military configuration."
This means that if the owner removes one of the Evil Features - takes off the grenade launcher, say, and throws it away - the weapon then becomes illegal, unless he goes on to remove all of them. Even the threads where the grenade launcher screwed on have to be ground off, or else covered by brazing on a muzzle compensator device.
Therefore, thanks to a long series of Federal laws and bureaucratic interpretations, it is illegal to install a bayonet on a Chinese SKS imported after 1990, but equally illegal to remove one from a similar rifle made in Yugoslavia! Even Franz Kafka might have been impressed.
For a sixty-year-old firearms design that wasn't exactly revolutionary even when new, the SKS has become the center of a great deal of excitement - "hysteria" might not be too strong a word in some cases - and public controversy in the US in our own time. Reading some of the news stories and public pronouncements, one might get the impression that this is some terrible super-weapon responsible for an ongoing national bloodbath.
In fact, the SKS is not a particularly efficient weapon for serious social shooting, in comparison with more modern designs such as the M-16 or the AK-47. It has little to commend it to criminal types, being much too big and heavy for concealment, even fitted with an illegal folding stock. The street gangs have never cared for it; too unwieldy and slow-firing for drive-by shootings, too pedestrian in looks and styling, lacking the high-tech pizazz and status value of a true assault rifle or a machine pistol. (The bling bling of bang bang, as it were.) No doubt there are a few - almost certainly stolen - in gangster hands, but the average street punk would far rather have a MAC-10.
All the same, it's true that the SKS does show up in crime statistics; of the rifle shootings on record in the last few years, a lot of them were done with some model of Simonov carbine. Leave aside that rifle shootings account for only a tiny proportion of the gun homicides in the US - most victims get killed with pistols - the numbers might still seem troubling.
But the explanation is simple, and has nothing to do with the SKS's effectiveness as a murder weapon. Simonovs show up in more crimes than other rifles, because there are more of them. Thanks to the successive waves of low-priced imports, a lot of people own SKSs; and the more of them there are, the higher the odds of them turning up in crimes.
(By analogy: undoubtedly more fatal auto crashes involve Chevrolets than Porsches. Does this mean the Chevrolet is inherently a more dangerous design, and should be taken off the streets? No, there are just more Chevys out there and inevitably more of them will get in trouble.)
There is no denying that there are places in the world where the presence of Simonov-pattern weapons, in the hands of violent and irresponsible people, represents a serious problem and results in a great deal of bloodshed and tragedy. The United States, however, is not one of them.
Meanwhile the SKS has carved out a solid niche for itself in the American gun picture, particularly among working-class people who appreciate its homely virtues. In many areas it has become a common sight in truck-cab racks; small-town sporting-goods stores and rural one-stops have begun stocking 7.62x39mm. ammunition as a standard item.
One interesting example: on the Navajo Reservation in the Southwest, the SKS has become so popular that it threatens to displace the traditional Winchester .30-30 carbine as the rifle of choice. Reservation Navajos have a serious need for a good reliable gun; hunting for them is not just a sport but a vital source of protein. Then there are predators to be dealt with, and not just coyotes killing sheep; many Navajos live in isolated houses or trailers or hogans, impossible for the Reservation police to protect, and white thugs from neighboring towns regard them as legitimate prey. In desert country the ranges are too great for pistols or shotguns, and heavy sporting rifles are too expensive and delicate.
For the Navajos, the SKS is a natural. Its compact design makes it easy to carry in a saddle boot or pickup rack; it has enough power and accuracy for any game found in those parts - at least in the steady hands of a keen-eyed Navajo - and enough firepower for defensive purposes. It isn't readily disabled by a bit of sand and doesn't require a lot of maintenance. And its low price, and that of its ammunition, makes it accessible to low-income Reservation dwellers.
Contrary to the assumptions of activists and polemicists and social theorists, not everyone in the United States lives in a city or a neatly manicured suburb and gets all his food at the supermarket....
The SKS has come up a very long and winding road in its six-decade life. Conceived and designed as a weapon to help drive the German invaders from the Soviet Union, it took no more than a token part in that drama; adopted and issued as the Red Army's standard infantry rifle, it saw no action in that role and was phased out within a few years. Yet it went on, in other hands, to help set parts of the world on fire; and, if it never contributed to the Great Patriotic War, it certainly played a part in at least one major Communist victory of historic importance.
And eventually it became an item of commerce between Communist and recovering-Communist nations and the former American enemy. What must Lenin's ghost have thought? But perhaps the old Marxist would have approved of this Socialist product ending up in the hands of the proletariat.
PREVIOUS PAGE: THE SKS PROLIFERATES