My spiritual pain is unbearable. I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?
Interpretation
The quote expresses deep spiritual turmoil over the moral implications of one's actions in the context of faith and duty.
Mikhail Kalashnikov reflects on the inner conflict he faces as the creator of the AK-47, grappling with the deaths caused by his invention. He questions the morality of being a weapon designer while identifying as a Christian and an Orthodox believer, highlighting the struggle between professional responsibilities and personal beliefs.
In practice
In a lecture on the ethics of weapons manufacturing, this quote can illustrate the internal conflict faced by creators.
When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed.' So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable.
The fact that people die because of an AK-47 is not because of the designer, but because of politics.
It is the Germans who are responsible for the fact that I became a fabricator of arms. If not for them, I would have constructed agricultural machines. (...) If someone asks me how I can sleep at night knowing that my arms have killed millions of people, I respond that I have no problem sleeping, my conscience is clean. I constructed arms to defend my country.
People often ask me how I feel about my invention being used to kill people every day and the AK being a common weapon of ethnic conflicts. I want to make it clear that I created my assault rifle to protect my country. You can blame politicians for its spreading out of control on a global scale.
But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?
You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them.
In contrast to the institutions of the world, which teach us to KNOW something, the gospel of Jesus Christ challenges us to BECOME something...The gospel of Jesus Christ is the plan by which we can become what children of god are supposed to become...Charity is something one becomes.
I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?
Although believers by nature are far from God, and children of wrath, even as others, yet it is amazing to think how nigh they are brought to him again by the blood of Jesus Christ.
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
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