Mikhail Kalashnikov, the former Red Army sergeant behind one of the world’s most omnipresent weapons — the AK-47 and its variants and copies, used by national armies, terrorists, drug gangs, bank robbers, revolutionaries and jihadists — died Dec. 23 at a hospital in Izhevsk, Russia. He was 94.

He lived in Izhevsk, the capital of the Russian republic of Udmurtia. Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for the republic’s president, confirmed the death to news sources but did not give a cause. Mr. Kalashnikov had been hospitalized for the past month with unspecified health problems.

Mr. Kalashnikov began life as a sickly child in a peasant family and would have seemed an unlikely candidate for the international fame he achieved. He became a folk hero in his native land and a celebrity abroad. Despite having little technical training, he rose to the top of the Soviet armaments industry and traveled throughout the world, including the United States, as the face of Russian weaponry, an advertisement for a Soviet product that actually worked.

Jim Supica, director of the National Firearms Museum in Fairfax County, called Mr. Kalashnikov a “giant of firearms design. Kalashnikov’s genius was in designing a military rifle that was cheap to manufacture, rugged and reliable.”

Mr. Kalashnikov headed the design team that produced the AK-47 — standing for automatic by Kalashnikov, model of 1947 — as the assault rifle for the newly retitled Soviet Army. It went into service two years later and then was provided to the Soviet Union’s allies and clients, as well as many other countries Moscow was trying to influence during the Cold War and after.

I do disagree with the many people around the Internet who have said he has blood on his hands, should burn in Hell, etc. The way I see it, he is an engineer who devised a superior product to defend his country during a time of conflict and tension. To pin him against the wall for its eventual larger impact, for the way society and the human condition has utilized and refracted his invention, is unfair.