Can a lethal weapon be a design classic?

Well yeah, obviously it can, question answered, let's move on. Do they pay you for this? (I have developed a condition called bloggolalia where you hear comments in your head before people post them).

But this isn't just any lethal weapon. This is the Soviet Union's Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle, developed in the 1940s for the Arctic, and popular with assault rifle users everywhere.

A Kalashnikov has just been acquired by London's Design Museum.

To experience the edgy quality of this choice by the Design Museum, which is building up its collection of "classics" before moving to bigger premises in 2014, try googling the Kalashnikov. Even reading its Wikipedia entry, or the Kalashnikov home page that explains the gun's origins in the second world war and the military design genius of Kalashnikov himself, makes you feel you have crossed an invisible line into the world of terrorists and lone assassins. It is a bit unsettling. The Kalashnikov is a cult object but not in the same way as the magazine The Face or the Sony Walkman, two more new acquisitions by the Design Museum.

Yet weapons have been collected and have been popular exhibits for at least as long as works of art. People flocked to see cannons and battle axes at the Tower of London long before the National Gallery opened.

What makes someone collect arms and armour? At the Wallace Collection in London, the same Victorian collecting passions that brought together so many fine paintings and objets d'art in this treasure house filled a suite of galleries with ivory handled crossbows, shining scimitars and sinister pikestaffs.

At the V&A in London you can see a sword scabbard that belonged to the murderous Cesare Borgia, model for Machiavelli's Prince. It's a darkly beautiful souvenir of conspiracy and killing.

Is it time that cleanses these old weapons? Or the lingering myth of medieval chivalry that turns knightly swords and lances into imaginative wonders?

Yes, but it is not entirely a fictional difference between past and present. Chivalry, tournaments and the tales of King Arthur made medieval war more theatrical than modern conflict. The coming of gunpowder made death and wounds much more brutal, inflicted from a distance, at increasingly industrialised rates. The gun was a "hellish" invention, thought the first people to see its effects.

That's why it is hard to be romantic about a Kalashnikov. This is a killing machine, cold and inhuman. But it probably does belong in the Design Museum. Unfortunately.