Dragunov Bounty (NRA Video)

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Dragunov Bounty: NRA National Firearms Museum Featured Gun

In the course of the Vietnam War, an unusual adversary fielded against American forces was the latest of Russian sniping arms—the Dragunov rifle. Designed to replace the aging bolt-action Mosin-Nagant scoped rifles that had served in the war against Germany, the semi-automatic 7.62x54mm Snaiperskaya Vintovka Dragunova (SVD) rifle incorporated a semi free-floating barrel, an unusual skeletonized stock and a novel optical sight with passive infrared detection capability. Few were seen, but rumors abounded.

Information about the new rifle was keenly sought by Western intelligence agencies, which offered an impressive $20,000 bounty for the first example to be recovered for study. This later imported Chinese variant NDM-86 rifle, reverse-engineered from the original Russian snipers sent to Southeast Asia, and isolated examples still being recovered from battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq are ample proof the long-barreled Dragunov rifle is still an intriguing military design.

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