I am a bit of a fan of espionage stuff. Spy movies, books, and that kind of thing. I like the real stuff. Not as big into the fake stuff. Loved Spy Game and read the book by the KGB guy who flipped Aldrich Aimes and Robert Hansen. Well. I had a discussion with a friend about this stuff and about the special spy gadgets and we naturally guns came up. And I pointed out that the Russians invented their own little assassin rifle in the VSS Vintorez.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSS_Vintorez
In case you don’t know what it is I have the link. So why is it the “assassin’s rifle?” Well it is broken down quickly and is suppressed with a max effective range of roughly 400m. And it is issued to the Spetznaz and the round is a necked down 7.62x39mm rifle round. And? Subsonic. But still maintains the oomf that is needed inside the “effective range.” So this is a crazy concept rifle and very interesting as a weapon. You can always count on the Russians to find odd solutions to odd problems.
But what I find interesting is that I couldn’t really find any counterpart in “the west.” Maybe I am not looking hard enough? Does anyone know of any US or other “western” (read as NATO) militaries that use something like this? Or have something like this? Maybe even the Israelis? The closest thing I have seen is a guy here in the US trying to reverse engineer this rifle to sell it. And good lord what a headache that would be for paperwork. Out of sheer curiosity...does anyone else know of any similar western weapons? Something that is easier to suppress than a standard rifle round (due to subsonic ammo), but has a greater range than a pistol round? Does that even exist?
Anyway. I just figured I would share this weapon with any spy fans out there. Especially if anyone is particularly interested in Russian weapons...or distrusts them and think they have no problems with assassinations...
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