In 2007 it threatened to do so again when the AK nominated Abdullah Gul as president.
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So whichever candidate the AK Party has put forward would be the winning candidate, theoretically speaking.
The AK might lose a few votes, but Turkey could still win the peace.
In 1919, Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian engineer and designer of the AK-47 rifle that bears his name, born.
One drawback is that, at grassroots level, the CHP is a shadow of the AK's electoral machine.
The AK-47-style pistols resemble the AK-47 assault rifle, but with shorter barrels and without a rear stock.
"Not everybody can fire the AK series of weapons, not everybody can throw grenades like that, " he said.
They only have two things in common, they are all Sunni and they carry the AK-47 assault rifle.
And because Iraqi police are not just facing common criminals, they are getting live-fire training with the AK-47s.
When Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the AK prime minister, markets the Turkish model in the Arab world, he stresses secularism.
The Soviet-designed automatic assault rifle, the Avtomat Kalashnikova, was first manufactured in 1947 (hence its commonest version, the AK-47).
Ahmet Turhan, the AK-appointed governor of Batman province, thinks some of them can.
Research in Motion is working on a touch-sensitive device, dubbed Thunder, that its engineers reportedly call the AK, for Apple Killer.
These flourished into a full-blown strategic partnership in the 1990s, before the AK party's rise, when peace between Palestinians and Israelis seemed possible.
More pertinently, it is nearly double the range of the AK-47, a rifle of Soviet design that is used by many insurgent groups.
The AK Party, which was re-elected last year with a convincing 47% of the vote, says it is a matter of personal and religious freedom.
Yet the 42% of Turks who voted no in the referendum remain deeply suspicious of Mr Erdogan and the AK. Turkey is a divided country.
After the failure of repeated attempts to get him elected through parliament, the AK Party called Sunday's election in an effort to ease the deadlock.
But, as far as the secularists are concerned, any candidate that the AK Party proposes, they see that as a threat to the secular republic.
The AK party has also reversed decades of official policy by trying to meet the demands of Turkey's large Kurdish minority (some 14m in a total population of 72m).
Their ability to do so was enshrined in a landmark law, passed by the AK government in June 2009, that allows men in uniform to be tried in civilian courts.
Turkey's generals found this out when voters returned the AK for a second term in the July 2007 general election with a thumping 47% of the vote soon after the top brass threatened a coup.
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American firearms are in high demand because Mexico's firearm laws are highly restrictive and high-powered weapons such as the AK-47-style pistol are deemed for the exclusive use of the Mexican military, U.S. prosecutors said in court documents.
The AK-47, for example, is widely available to private citizens around the U.S. as a semi-automatic version (firing one shot each time the trigger is pulled), but the military grade fully automatic (continuous fire while the trigger is depressed) model is illegal almost everywhere.
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Using the newspaper collection at the AK Bell Library in Perth and the series of trial papers held at the National Archives of Scotland's West Register House, Mr Paton says that what he discovered was a "sorry picture of an investigation that was simply incapable of bringing the perpetrator to justice".
The EU also welcomed the Yes vote in a Turkish referendum in September 2010, which gave the ruling AK Party the go-ahead to change the military-era constitution and bring it more into line with EU norms.
And at the moment, the governing AK Party has the overwhelming majority in the parliament.
One person has been injured in explosions at Turkey's justice ministry and the headquarters of the governing AK Party in Ankara, officials say.
The problem of cyber arms control is akin to the greatest arms control failure of the Cold War, which still persists: the mass distribution of the most produced firearm in human history, the Kalashnikov AK-47.
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