This is an excellent point. From what I can tell, the AK and AR have fairly different sets of strengths and weaknesses. This makes an overall comparison between the two difficult; the question of "which one's better?" always needs to be answered with "for what?" But I think most people would agree that in terms of reliability under harsh conditions with little or no maintenance, the AK comes out ahead.ddurkof wrote:Interesting conversation. But.... Just sticking to weapons the best would be the AK-47 and any 9 mm pistol that is battle proven. Why? Where in the current world is there someplace that is "The end of the world as we know it?" And what do they do there to survive? The closest I can think of is Afghanistan. What do they do there to survive. Raise grains and herd goats while carrying AK-47s and some combloc pistols. They have tribes that they associate with that elders run. This is what the end of the world would look like, if it was truly the end of the world.
However, I think that you would run into some issues with ammo availability with an AK. I might be completely wrong here, but it seems like at least part of the reason why there are so many Com Bloc weapons in Afghanistan is that there was an armed Soviet presence there for years and years, to say nothing about the general proliferation of the AK through the third world. I would guess that a lot of people there use them because they're available, not because of any particular preference for the design or anything (of course, then you get into the whole chicken/egg discussion of AKs only being fielded there in the first place because of reliability, but that's neither here nor there).
Even with the domestic popularity of the AK platform among civilians, it doesn't seem to me to be as ubiquitous as the AR. It's been a while since I've had occasion to look for it, but 7.62x39 was getting hard to find for a while, and I assume that this is still the case. In terms of both stockpiling ahead of time (obviously the preferred option) and, God forbid, having to scavenge ammunition after some sort of major cataclysm, 5.56 is probably going to be cheaper and/or easier to find. If it really hits the fan, I'd feel better with a weapon that could accept the ammunition and magazines as the ones used by whatever forces of law and order are likely to have been deployed.
I feel sort of sheepish about it sometimes, but I have to admit that I was paranoid enough and put enough thought into this to make sure that I got something that would accept NATO STANAG magazines when I went shopping for an EBR a while back....