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I've shot an SKS a couple times. It is indeed a fine rifle. The stripper clips can be tricky if you are not used to them.
The SKS is the ultimate successor to the Winchester 94- all the same fundamental limitations, same form factor/overall size, same power of cartridge (.30-30 is far weaker than its case size would otherwise suggest).
The AK kind of fits that description too, but only in the sense that it technically has a Win 94 compatibility mode (the Saiga rifles being the best example) rather than having been designed solely with that mode in mind.
Yeah 7.62x39 is not at all a well designed round. They took the old 7.62x54R and shortened the case length until it was small enough. No design process or attempt to optimize for performance. You end up with a moderate sized round with low recoil and poor ballistic performance. They could have instead made a deadlier higher-velocity flatter-shooting round. But they didn't want to.
To leap to the defense of the SKS: it is light, not too long and low recoil. I have a Korean War M1 and that thing is heavy and the ammo is enormous in comparison. Keeping size and weight in mind, I'd want the SKS.
But strange these two would-be murderers didn't bring any modern magazine fed rifle.
Routh spent all his money on flying around. Had he brought quality camo and laid on the ground looking like some slightly wilting local plants he might have gotten off a shot.
He was in the area for cca 12 hours.
Mid grade AR15s are cheaper than SKSs in America. Long gone are the days of cheap Soviet guns and ammo. This was a stylistic choice or something. Something unrelated to fairly considering their capabilities and prices.
Possible, the guy was near psychotic. You might be right, or it was the gun he could get. He was a felon, so probably couldn't get much of a choice.
Or maybe shooting a Russian asset with a Russian made gun seemed like the thing to do.
I haven't cared much about guns since about the cheap russian import era, when that was the case both here and in the US.
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Honestly, no, they couldn't have done that.
They couldn't have done that because they didn't know to do that. There were clues they could have paid attention to- the Federov is chambered in what is basically 6.5 Grendel, after all- but 2400 FPS isn't exactly slow by WW2 military rifles standards (to the point that the British thought ~140 grains at 2400 FPS should become the standard general purpose machine gun round for NATO). And militaries, especially ones that thought their next major war would be fought in Eastern Europe (and the Soviets were indeed correct on that point) do want that little bit of extra range- because that place is all plains.
In fairness to the Soviets it's not like 5.56 is particularly well-designed either considering it's just stretched .222, forgetting that you actually need to leave space for a properly-designed bullet. You can hack around that by loading the cartridge to the fucking moon, which is why the US has to replace its M4 bolts now where it didn't with M193.
I don't know enough about 5.8x42 to shit-talk it.
No cartridge in modern use was truly a clean sheet design. Even the Tround used a .36-caliber (9mm) projectile.
There were people in the late 19th and early 20th century who grasped an important point about ballistics that drove them toward a hypothetical high velocity 6.x mm round as the ideal round. They were ignored by the gigantic round advocates in charge of the US at the time. But they existed. That was originally published in 1930, it was republished 1957.
In the 19th century the US Navy correctly envisioned the future and developed a high velocity round.
In a report used to justify the development of the 19th century .236 Navy.
Looking at the development of the 7.62x39 I see that the Soviets considered dozens of alternatives. But never once considering high velocity smaller diameter. Maybe they were unaware of American and British developments in high velocity smaller caliber rounds. And so merely made a really underpowered version of some 19th century round.
They already had a perfectly serviceable intermediate round that they had only recently phased out- the 6.5x50mm Japanese cartridge. Soviets had Not Invented Here syndrome.
Which they didn't continue with. Too much barrel wear- materials science and manufacturing tolerances just weren't there yet.
The advantage of going larger (and using shorter projectiles) means you don't get nearly as much barrel wear; to the point that you'll crack the receiver on an AK at the trunnion (a consequence of being one step removed from a bolt-action conversion) before you shoot the barrel out. This is why, when you compare 6.5 Creedmoor guns to .308, and fire the same weight of projectile, you'll find the barrel on the 6.5 will be shot out sooner- you'll also notice that all the other militaries that used 6.5mm cartridges underloaded them compared to how hot they would be loaded later on, and I think this has something to do with it. 6.5 Grendel guns have the same issue compared to 7.62x39 (though to a much lesser degree than 6.5CM), which is why the only military that uses that round is running a shorter 108-grain projectile (at 2750 FPS) rather than a comparable 124-grain one from 7.62x39 (running around 2400).
7.5 French uses a slightly shorter, lighter projectile compared to 7.62 NATO for similar reasons.
.30-30 is perfectly adequate for animals in the 200-pound weight class regardless of how many legs they walk on. 7.62x39 wasn't even the first cartridge to copy that ballistic profile; that one goes to .30 Remington, then 7.35 Carcano (all 51-52mm in length- inefficient when you consider how much brass is needed to make those cartridges compared to 7.62x39, but all of them are exactly as powerful as they need to be).
It's also the most powerful intermediate cartridge; 7.92x33 (and later, .300 Blackout) is down 200 FPS from the Soviet round, and 7.62x33 (aka .30 Carbine) runs 400 FPS slower. But .30 Carbine is not really a 300 yard cartridge, whereas x39 has a much easier time of it.
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Y'know, come to think of it, most of our current calibers really do stretch back to sizes common in the days of muzzleloaders...
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