The Ergonomics of Terror

Last week on one of the newscasts I watch (Univision? Les 20 Heures?), the jihadi-video-excerpt-o-the-day showed these three black-clad guys jumping around a corner and striking poses, almost Charlie's Angels style, but holding their Kalashnikovs sideways—a posture I'd seen only with handguns, and generally in a hip-hop sort of context ("a cooler but less accurate way of aiming").

It seemed to me that firing a machine gun held sideways would pose some ergonomic issues—would the 90 degree rotation increase the recoil stress on the wrist? I emailed a friend of Muslim background who, more importantly, spent a few years in the US Army. Here's a bit of his reply:

I have heard the AK kicks a bit, so they'd have to be pretty strong to hold it like that with one hand, not resting it on a shoulder and get bullets anywhere near the targets, so that makes me think they're just posing and not practicing.

As for cartridge release, that's probably the biggest problem for them. Being orthodox Muslims, they should be firing their rifles right handed. Almost all rifles are built for right handed people, so the spent cartridges shoot off to the right and to the back of the rifle. This pushes them back away from the person firing. If they were to the rifles sideways with their right hands, the cartridges would shoot up and back into their faces or down their shirts. Only a lefty would benefit from a sideways hold. I used to get hot cartridges in my shirt all the time. almost made me consider firing right handed. If I could get any kind of stability with a sideways grip, I'd probably have used it, but it was completely unstable with the M-16. Also, I would have been obliterated by a drill sergeant for trying to be cool.

Again, however, I don't know the AK.

The bigger question I have is to what extent the guys who make these videos are purposely referencing American-style violence, and to what extent they've just assimilated it. (Are they familiar with hip-hop videos, for instance?) My friend doubted that theory: "I fully believe that they have just assimilated. If they thought about it at all, they would realize that copying American style violence is antithetical to the purpose of their violence."

Often when I see the excerpts of these videos I start wondering more about how they're made and directed, who provides the background music (sympathizers with synthesizers?), and so forth. But—as was the case when I tried briefly to track down the video that inspired this post—this is the sort of research that makes me queasy, or at least that I have mixed feelings about entering into just because it's "interesting" in a way abstracted from the life and death matters at hand.