“One of the reasons we see a lot of Kalashnikovs and AK-47s on the black market is because Russia has just upgraded the Kalashnikov, and that has created massive stockpiles of the older models,” said Kathie Lynn Austin, an expert on arms trafficking and the director of the Conflict Awareness Project, an international nongovernmental organization dedicated to investigating major arms traffickers.
Weapons left over from wars are also often trafficked across borders, which was the case after the Libyan revolution in 2011. The New York–based nonprofit Foreign Policy Association says that there are millions of weapons from the conflict and there is little regulation by government officials.