by Iain Overton
We spoke about facts. But, in a way, when it came to Mark giving a broad introduction to guns, there was not that much to say. In this world the devil was in the detail. What calibre, what model, these were finer points that many gun enthusiasts fixate on – but not ones that captured my attention. I couldn’t get excited about the small tweaks made to a handgun to sell a newer, deadlier version. I was more interested in what these guns did.
Just as well, really, because when it came to the basic physics of the firearm, Mark said things hadn’t really changed since the fourteenth century. All a gun needs, he explained, is a barrel, a missile, a means of projection, a form of ignition and a way to point it. All the developments since these principles were first conceived were pretty much just perfecting this process.
‘They may be lighter, more compact, but they are fundamentally the same,’ he said, leaning forward over his mug. ‘There have been two major step changes in the development of firearms. The development of the self-contained cartridge in the early nineteenth century and the gun that can fire automatically – developed by the British – by Maxim.’ Perhaps this is what lies beneath the enduring popularity of guns, I thought. The fact that there’s an alluring simplicity to how they work.5
Finishing his tea, Mark rose from the table and told me to follow. He handed over a pair of white gloves, and then, like vicious mime artists, we entered the stacks. There he began to pass me rifle after rifle, with a disconcerting casualness.
Closest to us was a Gardner gun – a five-barrelled, hand-operated machine-gun, fed from a vertical magazine. As the crank turned, he explained, a bullet was loaded into the breech, the bolt closed, and the gun fired.6 It was part of a major landmark in the development of the gun. There were even men who saw civilisation’s face in this mechanised operation purely because the Gardner gun worked on the principle of serialisation. As such the machine-gun was seen, by some, as a product of a rational culture. By default, cultures that could not create such a killing weapon were deemed less civilised, and so open to imperial rule.
Such men would have been impressed here, because in this fortified chamber the walls were lined with sub-machine-guns. Anti-aircraft guns, first designed to combat the use of observation balloons in the American Civil War, also stood to the far left. To the right there were Chinese DShKs; a gun mounted on wheels, called, affectionately, ‘Sweetie’. These stood beside a low line of recoilless rifles once used as tank busters. And there, on the end, were Russian rifles that fired underwater. Civilisation’s progress laid out in deadly metal.
These guns all told a story in their own way. They spoke of how rifles and pistols had turned the course of history. How the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo unleashed the First World War. How the killing of Martin Luther King pushed the US closer to equal race rights. They spoke of how the gun has helped bring advances in industrial production methods and advanced modern medicine. And they all spoke of death.
There, on the far wall, one rack held a familiar shape: the long, curved magazine, the wooden stock, the iron sights. A gun that could fire automatically like a machine-gun, or could let loose single shots, like a sniper rifle; that could be chucked in a river and dragged in the mud and still not jam; a weapon so popular that tens of millions of them have been made. It was the Kalashnikov or AK47, the most famous and the deadliest gun in the world. So practical and lethal has it proved in modern conflict that it has featured on the coats of arms of Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and East Timor. There are statues to it in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and on the dusty plains outside Baghdad in Iraq. It’s had a cocktail named after it and is a drinks brand in its own right, sold in bottles moulded in its iconic shape. Some parents have even named their babies ‘Kalash’, so deep has been its global allure.
Mark extended a white-gloved hand and pulled down one from China.
‘That’s a type 56,’ he said, putting the barrel close to his face. ‘Yes, it’s from a northern province. This folding stock was new.’ It came from State Factory 66, just one of 15 million of its type produced there since the 1950s. He pulled out another; from 1981, he told me, Chinese as well. His finger traced the first two digits of the serial number. There are about ninety variants of this type, he said, and pointed at a vicious black derivative – one with a hard metal folding stock. ‘East German.’ He needn’t have said any more. It looked East German. There was nothing funny about it.
You could see national traits in many of these guns, however subtle. The Finnish version had a certain chic to it – a tubular stock that evoked northern European woods and candles. The Egyptian one came with a small tree stamped on it, made especially by the Maadi company there on old imported Russian machines. The North Korean one looked cheap and sorry for itself – a small communist star on its base. The Red Young Guard, a force made of up fifteen-year-old Korean students, used this model; it was certainly light enough for their malnourished bodies. Then there were AKs from Pakistan, from Russia, from China – sometimes a dozen from one country alone. There was even an old Viet Cong one – the rifle that proved the ultimate battlefield leveller against the might of the American army.
The one that caught my eye, though, was the gold one: a glittering metal-plated AK designed to commemorate the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Saddam Hussein handed them out as gifts – a sort of oil-bling chic in limited edition.
‘I’ve got to hold that one,’ I said. Something in me was feeling the pull of history, the uniqueness of this whole situation. I wanted to get my picture taken with it, wearing too-large shades and an open-necked shirt.
‘Very Arab,’ Mark said, and eased it from me back onto the shelf.
He took me to another rack. Here was a Lebanese M16 semi-automatic – this one made by Colt USA. Beside it was an M16 seized from the IRA – complete with a filed-down serial number. Next to it was a line of futuristic and squat black Belgian FN F2000s – a weapon so beloved of Colonel Gaddafi’s murderous forces. There was ingenuity to all of these; as you moved along the line many had small modifications that improved on the design of its neighbour.
‘If I find a new way of protecting myself, you will find a new way of preventing that,’ Mark said.
Then, with a certain reverence, he pulled out an 1805 model of the Baker Rifle – a rifle used on the fields of battle at Waterloo in 1815. It weighed about the same, he said, as the British army’s SA80 rifle today: ten pounds. I held it and imagined a scared seventeen-year-old in rank and file clutching its wooden stock with child’s hands, fearing all that lay ahead.
We moved away from the military weapons and on to a rack of sporting guns, notable for their provenance and their price. Mark pulled out a hunting rifle – a .375 H & H Magnum – carried by a companion of President Roosevelt on an African hunting trip in 1909. A similar one to this fetched almost $32,000 at auction. Next to it was an M30 Luftwaffe Sauer & Sohn Drilling, the world’s most expensive survival firearm. A three-barrelled shotgun complete with a Nazi swastika, it was designed to help Germany’s Luftwaffe pilots avoid capture. You could see Hermann Goering’s obsession with beauty and craftsmanship in this elegant and totally impractical weapon. And just as I thought that you couldn’t get more expensive than that, Mark showed me the most pricey gun in his collection: a bespoke Arab commission of a Smith & Wesson Model 60, made in powder blue and coated in 984 diamonds. It costs over £120,000.
But this opulence was not the thing to catch my eye. Rather, there, nestled in a rack among some ageing rifles, was the prototype for the late nineteenth-century Magazine Lee Enfield Rifle. In army terminology it was the MLE, or ‘Emily’, the rifle clutched by thousands and thousands of British soldiers as they marched to their deaths in the First World War, and one of the first of millions made. It was also the rifle that had introduced me to the world of the gun – the one I learned to shoot with in the Army Cadets.
Before I could get too distracted, Mark moved us on to a small and nondescript chest of drawers – a cabinet o
f curiosities. Drawer after drawer of discreet guns used by the secret service were opened. There was the famous James Bond Walter PPK, 9mm;7 a Parker Pen gun; a ‘sleeve’ gun designed to be tucked up a jacket; guns disguised as lighters, rings, pagers, belt buckles and penknives. All of them innocuous and all capable of killing.
‘Squirrelly,’ Mark described them. They certainly captured the imagination – secret agents and honey-traps and the whiff of soupy rendezvous in the fog of East Berlin. We carried on, each rifle catching Mark’s eye taken out, examined and admired. So time passed in this space without sun or guiding light. It felt as if we were in a huge mausoleum – a tomb of arms. A feeling of claustrophobia started to form, and the buzzing overhead lights began to hurt my eyes. Then, suddenly, it was time to say goodbye.
I had one final question. I asked Mark about his hand. ‘Did you lose it in a shooting accident?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was a Thalidomide baby.’ In the late 1950s the prescribing of a pill to combat morning sickness caused hundreds of babies to be born with defects. His false hand had nothing to do with a gun wound. He smiled and bade me farewell and, after another body search to make sure no secret-service pen guns had ended up in my pocket, I left.
Night was falling, and I walked away from this secret vault with its murderous contents, out into a drizzling, darkening northern city. A Thalidomide baby, I thought, turning up my collar. So much for assumptions.
I woke to the sound of an argument. The whores had been up all night, and the dawn was just hitting the sidewalks of Geneva; they were still short of a good night’s takings. Such things test the patience of anyone.
I pushed open the window and looked down. The pink neon strips of Le Player’s sex lounge shimmied in the lessening dark; the transsexuals, who had pushed their long legs out at the passing men, had left the kerb outside World’s Elite hours before, but the women from the Congo were still there. They knew what work really was and they whistled and plucked at the sleeves of men seeking comfort in the early morning. They were sweet-perfumed and hard-faced.
After Leeds I had come here, to Switzerland, to get my facts straight about how many guns there were in the world. The night before I had read that in 2007 it was estimated that there was about one gun for every seven people in the world; that police forces had about 26 million firearms; armies 200 million;8 and that civilians owned the rest: 650 million.9 These figures came from the Small Arms Survey – a Swiss-based organisation that lay about a mile away from where I was staying and which was my next port of call.
I had a meeting that morning with their chief, Eric Berman. With almost a billion guns out there, his job was to give some semblance of statistical order to them. He was, in a sense, a worldwide oracle on gun facts and figures. Definitely a man to meet. So I dressed and left the hotel, passed the cat-calling women and headed out to Geneva’s waking streets.
The Small Arms Survey was on Avenue Blanc, and the area could not have been more Swiss. The Survey’s office was tucked away in the same building as the Myanmar, Cape Verde and Tanzanian missions. Next door to them was a chocolate shop with an oversized cacao bunny in the window. Beside that stood a business school, a medical centre and the Swiss Audit & Fiduciary Services Company. It all had a sterility and orderliness to it that was a world away from the gore and blood that gun violence brings.
I rang the bell. Eric was called for. As I waited, I browsed the magazines on the waiting-room table: Defence News International, Security Community, Asian Military Review – bitter-edged titles. The same could be said of the photography on the walls. One showed bullet holes in a window overlooking a grimy industrial sprawl in La Vela Gialla, an Italian neighbourhood run by the Camorra mafia family. There was a photo of a drug dealer’s hand in Brooklyn, clutching a Colt Python .357 Magnum along with fifty bucks’ worth of five-dollar crack cocaine wraps. Then an image, black and white like the others, of Liberian youths clutching Kalashnikov-style assault rifles, wearing bandanas. They stared fiercely at the unflinching lens. Guns and their many faces around the world.
Eric appeared, shook my hand and led me to his office. We sat down, and I began to explain that I was writing this book about the world of guns and that . . .
‘You don’t have to butter me up,’ he said, and I was surprised. I thought this was going to be a nice conversation; he looked nice – slim, middle-aged, neat. He reminded me of one of those cautious editors you meet on British papers: clever without eccentricity, focused without shifting into obsessional.
‘The Small Arms Survey has many views on guns,’ he carried on, answering a question I hadn’t asked. ‘We don’t have a single view. My personal reason for doing this is very different from that of my colleagues . . .’ and he began to explain how the Survey is neither pro-armament or anti-gun. Then he stopped, looked at me and said, ‘Ask me a specific question.’
So I did. ‘How many guns are there in the world?’
But you can’t just give a number, he said. Eventually, after telling me how the Survey reviews 193 United Nation member states, and with all the caveats that go with not having access to decent data, he handed me three reports: ‘875 million was the global estimate.’ He then said that number could be higher – this figure was seven years old. He spoke of how secrecy surrounds military and law-enforcement figures, how the Survey has to estimate the number of guns some militaries have by looking at the numbers of soldiers at the height of a nation’s power, because when armies downsize their guns are often just put into storage. Such are the challenges of getting a bigger picture. But he did say one thing was certain: more weapons are produced globally each year than are destroyed.
I asked him if counting the number of guns owned by various militaries could help fuel an arms race between countries.
‘That’s a facile argument,’ he said, a spark of irritation deep in his eyes. I was intrigued by how defensive he was being. I told him so.
‘It’s hard to give you concrete answers,’ he said, crossing his arms.
‘There’s no intrinsic relationship between the quantities of firearms in a given place and the levels of violence,’ he said. ‘One can really skew one’s argument in favour or against gun control. You can pick and choose. You have to be very careful on this topic, as it is so easily manipulated and used. Some people just don’t appreciate the complexity of it.’
He saw me glaring back at him over my notebook, and he breathed out. You just have to be cautious, he told me. ‘Journalists can take a snippet of something you’ve said and use it to move an agenda forward, and I don’t want to get caught up in that.’
As he spoke, I realised this New Yorker, who had a map on the wall of a hitchhiking trail that he’d trodden years before through the Congo and who had lived in Israel and Kenya, Mexico and Cambodia, was not that dissimilar to me. Guns had propelled him around the world, and his view on them was as shifting as the sandy ground of facts he walked upon.
I had hoped to meet a guide – someone who could have showed me an intellectual and factual path in my journey into the world of the gun. But I’d met someone who refused to be rooted in one opinion, choosing instead ever-changing interpretations offered by ever-changing hard numbers. He told me the world of guns had changed him, that he now looks at data differently and he has to be more cautious in the words he uses to describe his Survey’s conclusions. Guns are inherently political, it was clear, and he strived for a consciously impartial voice.
He gradually relaxed and showed me his office. It was filled with softer things: humanity in baubles that had little to do with guns. A paperweight from the Central African Republic, a grave marker from Gabon, a stamp from the Republic of Guinea showing, surreally, Carrot Man from Lost in Space. An unopened bottle of Kazakh vodka rested on the shelf.
‘Make sure you write down that it was unopened.’ And I did, because in the world of guns you have to be careful with the facts, clearly.
After all, it’s a matter of life and death.
II. Pain
2. THE DEAD
The gun’s mountain of dead in hard numbers – Honduras – the most dangerous place on earth – the tragedy of three murdered women in a jaundiced street – a visit to the fire-marked morgue of San Pedro Sula – witnessing a journalist’s trade and a nighttime shooting – the secrets of the embalmers’ art
Guns kill, and in vast numbers, because even though we live in a world of nukes and ground-to-air missiles, chemical warfare and mortar rounds, it’s the gun that does the low-level, high-cost damage.1 The gun is the Top Trump of killers, and the numbers killed by gunfire are bloodily incontestable. While dead men might not talk, they do offer some statistical truths.
Global numbers are hard to come by, but estimates from international studies suggest that between 526,0002 and 600,0003 violent deaths happen annually. UN data on homicides show that in areas of high levels of murders, the vast majority of these are with guns – often over 80 per cent of them.4 An assault with a firearm is about twelve times more likely to kill you than being attacked in other intimate ways, like with a knife,5 so taking into account that as many as 90 per cent of deaths in conflicts are from being shot,6 an estimated level of 300,000 homicides with guns every year seems reasonable. Then there are the suicides. The World Health Organization has estimated that 800,000 people kill themselves each year. As one of the leading ways to end it is with a firearm, a figure of 200,000 suicides by firearm a year also seems a reasonable estimate to make.7
This all adds up to about half a million people dying every year from gunfire.
The type of deaths from guns, clearly, differs from country to country. If you live in the US or Canada, suicides account for the majority of gun deaths. In countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia or Albania the majority of gun deaths are homicide. Eastern Europe and southern Africa have lots of murder, but not many by firearm. Southern Europe and northern Africa don’t have many murders, but when they do, it’s much more likely to be with a gun.
