There are even children named after it and a couple of mosques with their minarets fashioned in the image of the AK-47 barrel, most notably in Iraq. They are so common in some parts of the world, particularly the East, that you can hand one to a child of twelve and it's likely they can field strip it and reassemble it blindfolded.

AKs even have a religious component. In some supposedly "Christian" countries, the users refuse to carry one that hasn't been blessed or marked with the name of a saint or the madonna. The Militant Islamic use of the AK as a religious and political symbol surpasses all logic.

What is even more amazing to me is the number of supposedly educated people who have no idea what an AK-47 is. They do not recognize it when they see it nor do they attach any name to it. And if you attempt to educate them, they say they don't think about things like that. They don't like violence. But they do like ignorance.

A weapon in and of itself is not violent. You can lay an AK-47 in a shallow grave in your back yard and cover it and walk away without fear that it will crawl out and attack you in your sleep. There are those who think they know what an AK-47 is who will tell you that when violence does occur and an AK-47 is present, then the circumstances are heightened and the event more evil. Horse pucky.
There are those who will tell you that the proliferation of the AK-47 made the brush wars of the 60s and 70s more nasty. Actually, I think the proliferation of cheap mass-produced machetes did that. What the AK-47 did was give the untrained civilians a simple tool that they could make noise and holes with. Enough civilians who know the terrain and can blend in with the population can make life difficult for trained soldiers who carry a lot more equipment and more complicated weapons.

The age of invading a foreign country and overwhelming the populace with superior firepower ended with the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. And part of that failure occured because of American arms shipments of Chinese AKs through Pakistan to the resisting Afghani tribesmen and warlords. Many of those weapons were turned on Americans when they went to visit recently, some in the hands of the same resisting tribes and warlords.

According to some sources, the President of Venezuela recently imported several boatloads of Russian AKs and is looking into building a factory for the manufacture of them.