> Humans can render other humans unrecognizable with a rock.
They are much less likely to.
We have instinctive repulsion to violence, especially extending it (e.g. if the rock does not kill at the first blow).
It is much easier to kill with a gun (and even then people need training to be willing to do it), and easier still to fire a missile at people you cannot even see.
Extreme violence then? With rocks, clubs of bare hands? I was responding to "render other humans unrecognizable with a rock" which I am pretty sure is uncommon in schools.
Not in public schools in the British sense. I assume it varies in public schools in the American sense, and I am guessing violence sufficient to render someone unrecognisable is pretty rare even in the worst of them.
You are discounting the complexity of the logistics required for an AK47 army. You need ammo, spare parts, lubricant and cleaning tools. You need a factory to build the weapon, and churn out ammunition.
Or, gather a group of people, tell them to find a rock, and go bash the other sides head.
Complexity of logistics applies to any large army. The single biggest limiting factor for most of history has been the need to either carry your own food, or find it in the field. This is why large-scale military violence requires states.
It should be noted that the purported advantages of AK action over its competitors in this regard are rather drastically overstated in popular culture. E.g. take a look at these two vids showing how AK vs AR-15 handle lots of mud:
As far as cleaning, AK, like many guns of that era, carries its own cleaning & maintenance toolkit inside the gun. Although it is a bit unusual in that regard in that this kit is, in fact, sufficient to remove any part of the gun that is not permanently attached. Which is to say, AK can be serviced in the field, without an armory, to a greater extent than most other options.
But the main reason why it's so popular isn't so much because of any of that, but rather because it's very cheap to produce at scale, and China especially has been producing millions of AKs specifically to dump them in Africa, Middle East etc. But where large quantities of other firearms are available for whatever reason, you see them used just as much - e.g. Taliban has been rocking a lot of M4 and M16 since US left a lot of stocks behind.
If you think the AKs in use in Russia and Ukraine aren’t getting regular maintenance, cleaning and spare parts, I don’t think you’re watching enough of the content coming out of the war zone.
Soldiering isn’t sexy, it’s digging trenches, cleaning kit, and eating concussive blasts waiting to fight or die.
You don’t sit in a bunker all day waiting to defend a trench and not clean your gun.
They are much less likely to.
We have instinctive repulsion to violence, especially extending it (e.g. if the rock does not kill at the first blow).
It is much easier to kill with a gun (and even then people need training to be willing to do it), and easier still to fire a missile at people you cannot even see.