"THE IRA has been secretly rearming while pretending to be decommissioning. In a flagrant breach of the Good Friday ceasefire agreement, senior IRA commanders bought a consignment of powerful new Russian special forces assault rifles in Moscow late last year.
They purchased at least 20 AN-94s, which can fire 1,800 bullets a minute and pierce body armour. The weapons can be used as a traditional machine gun or in sniper mode as a high-velocity rifle for assassinations."
Actually, it seems that the AN-94 is just a newly-designed standard military rifle that has not yet been adopted by the whole Russian military, probably because of cost. It uses a standard Russian military cartridge and, while it does have a mode that fires at a *rate* of 1800 rounds per minute, it only fires two rounds at this rate. It's hardly a super-rifle.