Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun

by Iain Overton

  That was why I was lost in that wood. I was at that range – Saari’s last location captured on film. The young killer was dead, but at that moment no one knew who had been behind the camera – an accomplice, even? I looked down at the man’s rifle, and my mind clouded with the possibilities.

  The man turned and stared intently. Then he tutted. And I realised what I had first mistaken for rage was actually annoyance. Saari had just filmed himself, and this man was not going to kill me. He was just bothered that I was here, stumbling about in the forest with my video camera. Because my presence, in this remote province of this little-visited country, was a clear signal to him of what was to come: a bloody media spectacle.

  The modern mass shooter and the modern media are intrinsically linked. Columbine, Dunblane, Sandy Hook: journalists, responding to the final performance of a lone shooter, have ensured that these place names are forever marked. In news ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, so the saying goes, and that evening the news the world over led with the blood Saari had shed and the name of Kauhajoki. Bulletins showed the rows of flickering candles and teddy bears outside the school. Images of the Finnish emergency services standing around awkwardly were transmitted across the world. And the shooter’s vicious videos and his ugly testimonies were replayed endlessly.

  Of course, this was a big story, not only because it was the second mass shooting that Finland had had in two years, but also because it was the death of young, hopeful white people. Such things are important in Western news agendas, because prejudices and priorities dictate the amount of airtime a story is given – what has been called a ‘hierarchical news structure on death’.3 A white shooter killing twenty kids in the US will dominate the global press. Twenty black adults dying in a hail of bullets in Nigeria will barely register. And when it comes to mass shootings, schools will always get more coverage than anywhere else, even though in the US businesses are almost twice as likely to be the blood-soaked epicentres of mass shootings.4

  What it means is that, while mass shootings may only constitute about 1 per cent of all gun deaths in the US, their impact in terms of headlines and column inches is profound.

  Some say it is too much, that the media’s saturated coverage of a mass shooting encourages others to carry out copycat attacks – tortured souls seeking to burn out in a blaze of infamy.5 They have a point. In 356 BC, a Greek called Herostratus torched the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was, contemporaries wrote, an attempt to immortalise his name.6 And it worked. The fact we know the arsonist’s name, the destroyer of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, shows us that terrible crimes can achieve eternal fame. In the same way we know the names of Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Behring Breivik and, possibly in small part because of my efforts, Matti Saari.

  This idea that the media can influence extreme behaviour is perhaps best illustrated by looking at the time when newspapers agreed to cooperate with the authorities following a spate of suicides in the 1980s subway system in Vienna. Negotiations led to local Austrian papers changing their coverage by avoiding any simple explainers as to why someone threw themselves in front of a train, by moving the tragic stories off the front page and keeping the word ‘suicide’ out of headlines. Subway suicides there fell by 80 per cent.7

  This led some to ask: ‘Would the same happen if there was a media blackout on mass shootings?’ Certainly there have been very vocal critics of the media’s saturation coverage of some mass shootings. A forensic psychiatrist told ABC News the airing of the Virginia Tech killer’s video tape was a social catastrophe: ‘This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character . . . There’s nothing to learn from this except giving it validation.’8 Others have said that the gory details of shootings help ‘troubled minds turn abstract frustrations into concrete fantasies’.9

  Perhaps these things are true. But the media’s focus also highlights things like the inadequacies of existing national gun law. The fierce coverage of Kauhajoki, for instance, encouraged the Finnish government to reduce the number of handgun licences and to raise the minimum age of gun ownership. The media helped do that.

  So, when journalists descend on a sleeping town where lives have been shattered by the sharp retort of gunfire, they should tell themselves they are there to report on these horrors for one reason and one reason only – to try to stop this happening again. Not to titillate, but to warn.

  We thought of these sensitivities as we lined up outside the school’s entrance that night – a straight run of white broadcast trucks in front of pools of candles and stunned locals. Then London called, and we were on-air.

  In 1966, a twenty-five-year-old ex-marine called Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas tower. He carried with him three rifles, three handguns and a sawn-off shotgun. By the time he was killed a few hours later, Whitman had shot forty-eight people, sixteen of whom died, and the world was introduced to a very unique, modern monster: the mass shooter.

  Of course, the terrible visitation of mass death on schools and offices is not just an American tragedy. The deadliest mass shooting was by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011, where sixty-nine died in a shooting spree, and a further eight lost their lives in a bomb blast. Before that, the world’s deadliest attack by a lone shooter was in a small farming community in South Korea. There, in 1982, a policeman called Woo Bum-kon killed fifty-six. His rampage was triggered when the woman he was living with woke him from a nap; she had swatted a fly that had landed on his chest.10

  Despite these global killings, the greatest media focus is on those carried out in the US. An Associated Press list of twenty of some of the ‘deadliest mass shootings around the world’ featured eleven US attacks.11 It’s been calculated that there have been over 200 such incidents in the US since 2006.12

  And if you define a mass shooting as one where at least four people are wounded, not killed, then in 2013 there were 365 American incidents: a mass non-lethal shooting every single day.13 It’s also seemingly getting worse. According to the FBI, the rate of deadly mass shootings went up from one every other month between 2000 and 2008 (about five a year) to over one per month between 2009 and 2012 (almost sixteen a year).14 Of the dozen deadliest shootings ever to have taken place in the US, half have been since 2007.15

  Of course, the media focus not just on the numbers killed and the frequency of the killings, but also on the people who wielded the guns. People ask: ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  It’s difficult to give a definitive answer. The US secret service looked at the phenomenon of mass shooters and concluded there was no single ‘profile’ of a school shooter. Each shooter differed from others in numerous ways. Despite this, there is a consensus that some trends exist. In 2001 a study looked at forty-one adolescent American mass murderers: 34 per cent were described as loners; 44 per cent had a preoccupation with weapons; and 71 per cent had been bullied.16 Other traits seem to dominate, too.

  Mass shooters are almost always male. There’s only been a handful of cases of female mass shooters: one such was Jennifer San Marco, a former postal worker, who killed five at a mail-processing plant in California, as well as her one-time neighbour, before shooting herself.17 Why mass shooters are so disproportionately male is unclear. Some see men as having a different approach to responding to life’s disappointments. Others see their violence as highlighting gender differences in testosterone levels and mental development.18 Each reason is frustratingly nebulous, though, and, apart from banning access to guns to all men, does little to help us work out how to put an end to such murders.

  Mass shooters are loners. In rare instances, there may be two shooters working together, such as in the Jonesboro massacre, where Mitchell Johnson, aged thirteen, and Andrew Golden, just eleven, shot dead four students and a teacher and wounded ten others.19 But, generally speaking, a mass shooter typically acts alone and is not affiliated to any group or cult, again making it hard for authorities to identify them and act preempti
vely.

  They are relatively young; the Congressional Research Service puts US mass shooters average age at thirty-three.20 It’s rare for them to be very young, though – ages eleven and thirteen are untypical. There are various things that go towards explaining why adolescents don’t go on rampages: children’s access to guns, the fact that teachers and parents are often able to intervene when adolescents exhibit worrying behaviour, and the reality that shorter lives are often not so filled with disappointment all play a part.

  We know that mass shooters are typically socially awkward. They rarely have close friends and almost never have had an intimate relationship, although they sometimes have had failed flings. They don’t tend to have problems with alcohol and drugs, and they are not impulsive – indeed quite the reverse.

  This might lead many to assume that mass shooters are all blighted with a long history of mental ill health. Not so. Obviously they all have a warped and broken view of the world to do what they do, but a diagnosed mental-health condition is an extremely poor predictive factor for profiling whether someone is likely to go on to become a mass shooter. A 2001 analysis of thirty-four American mass shooters found that only 23 per cent had a recorded history of psychiatric illness.21

  Despite this, we still fixate on the mental oddities of these troubled men. We comment on the fact Martin Bryant, who carried out the Port Arthur massacre in Australia, was really into the soundtrack of the Lion King.22 We write how Adam Lanza, the man who murdered so many children at Sandy Hook, carried a black briefcase with him, while other students had backpacks. We recall how Seung-Hui Cho, the warped killer of thirty-two at Virginia Tech, enjoyed taking photographs up the skirts of fellow students under the desks with his cell phone.23 But these are traits that, whilst odd, are far from proof of a mass murderer in the making. As one psychologist put it: ‘Although mass murderers often do exhibit bizarre behavior, most people who exhibit bizarre behavior do not commit mass murder.’24

  Nonetheless, it is fair to say that mass shooters are often very focused outsiders who plan their actions obsessively. Many massacres have been in the pipeline for months, sometimes years: the Columbine shooting took thirteen months to plan.25 Anders Behring Breivik in Norway claimed he had been plotting his actions for five years.

  This planning reflects a fixated and resentful view of the world. Mass shooters want to fix their ideas in history: a sort of personal vindication through gunfire. Whereas terrorists use guns and the media to promote political or religious beliefs, mass shooters use guns and the media to highlight their own personal grievances. Like Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho, who sent NBC News an 1,800-word statement and twenty-seven QuickTime videos with him ranting to the camera.26

  Other trends emerge. Many mass shooters take their own lives.27 Many wear tactical military clothing. They often use high-powered and rapid-fire weapons. Weapons used in sixty-two mass shootings over the last three decades were looked at by the website Mother Jones. Over half involved ‘semi-automatic rifles, guns with military features, and handguns using magazines with more than 10 rounds’.28 One of the guns that James Eagan Holmes used to shoot seventy-one, killing twelve, in Aurora, for instance, was an assault rifle with a 100-round drum magazine.29

  This use of such legal weaponry should concern. FBI data shows that, between 2009 and 2012, mass shootings that involved assault rifles or high-capacity magazines led to an average of sixteen people being shot, 123 per cent more than when other weapons were used.30

  These are ugly and disturbing observations and statistics. But they only served to help a little in my analysis of the world of the lone mass shooter. So I looked at the long list of perpetrators again, seeking someone who was, perhaps, representative of all of these trends.

  I was searching for an archetype – a shooter who was relatively young, alone and socially awkward; someone who wore a uniform and carried a semi-automatic rifle with high-capacity magazines; someone who was not clinically insane; a fantasist who had penned an angry manifesto. This Venn diagram of horrors showed up one ugly and familiar name. The most murderous mass shooter of them all: Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing killer.

  When I arrived in Norway to learn more about Breivik, the only car the Oslo hire company was able to lease me ran on electricity. I had never driven an electric car before and, as I headed through the dynamite-blasted grey mountains that led from the capital, I was disturbed to see the number on its power-gauge drop dramatically. It had read 123 kilometres when I pulled out of the car park. Now, 50 kilometres out, the power meter read 13, and I had 18 more kilometres to go. The beginnings of mild panic shifted up my spine, because the cold here was profound, and there were few car-charging points. Images of freezing to death in a Norwegian electric car – a hypothermic victim to a green response to global warming – dominated my thoughts.

  As the power dipped, so did the sun, casting its last shallow, anaemic light across the deep and broad lake of Tyrifjorden. And, as my car hugged the edge of the lake, my speed at an economic crawl, the wind lifted and caused the surface of the water to flutter. Beyond lay Utøya: the outermost island. Its name was still hard for some to say because this was where Breivik had killed dozens.

  Then, as the gauge told me I had two kilometres of power left, the Sundvolden Hotel, one of the oldest inns in Norway, came into view. Framed beneath the pine-rimmed peaks of King’s View and the stretching cold-blue lake, it had a beauty unique to Scandinavia.

  Its Gildehuset, with its tenth-century metre-thick walls and its foyer lined with the statues of glass-eyed bulbous trolls, could be considered idyllic. But this place will not be remembered for Norwegian fairy tales or Viking walls. It will be forever marked by what happened in 2011, because this is where the survivors staggered from the worst mass shooting by a single gunman ever recorded. And these rooms were filled with grief-wrapped relatives waiting for the cauterising news of how their sons and daughters had died.

  A few days before the shooting, about 600 people, mostly between fourteen and twenty-five years old, had gathered on the pine-lined island of Utøya, across the lake, for their annual summer camp. They were diverse and liberal – the cream of Norway’s Labour Party youth. But Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two-year-old from Oslo, saw betrayal in their tolerance and weakness in their ideals. So, on 22 July, he took a boat over to the island, hollow-point bullets in his pockets and murderous intent in his heart.

  Breivik shot his first victim just after 5.20 p.m. He gave himself up to police seventy-five minutes later, and by then sixty-nine people had died. He had fired 297 shots – 176 with his Ruger and 121 with the Glock. Eight more people were killed, and over 200 injured, by a fertiliser bomb that Breivik had detonated in Oslo’s government district an hour and a half before he began his island rampage.

  He carried out these horrors wearing the uniform of a police officer, playing on a trust in the state that is implicit in so much of Norwegian life. He was also wearing earplugs to protect himself from the sound of his gunshots. Two ugly details that tell you much about the man.

  He was indiscriminate and brutal in his killings. He usually fired only when he was certain to hit, killing slowly and methodically with headshots at very close range. He said to those hiding in the bushes ‘Don’t be shy’, before he shot them. Others he murdered as they held on to each other. Stuck on the suddenly claustrophobic island, some students braved the freezing waters and swam to safety. They were plucked like white gulls, bloodied and blue, from the hard rocks of the shore.

  Of the sixty-nine dead, sixty-seven had died from being shot, one drowned and one fell to their death from a cliff. Thirty-three of them were under eighteen years old. The youngest victim, Sharidyn Svebakk-Bøhn of Drammen, was just fourteen.

  I fell asleep in my ancient bedroom with that thought.

  The next day, my car recharged, I drove back out into the March light, the King’s View behind me, forests of pines and snow beyond. The silent road ran 30 metres above
the shore, and Utøya stood beyond, distant and inaccessible. There were two signs pointing the way to the island but no bridge. Precisely why Breivik chose it for his massacre.

  Where the route led down to the jetty someone had put up three plastic chairs and a sign that read ‘Private’. Beside it stood a row of neat postal boxes in wood, each hand-painted. The names on them spoke of long lineages and deep histories: Johnsrund, Aamaas, Syverson. Behind, on a stone, stood five memorial candles, gutted and unlit, circling a wet and dirty teddy bear. The Norwegian flag lay limply to one side, and a pine tree stood covered with broken decorations on its dripping leaves. A Christmas not celebrated.

  I drove further along the road to a campsite and pulled up near the main house. The bone-marrow chill had forced me to wear all the clothes I had. I eased out of the car and waddled over to ring the bell. Nothing. But as I headed back, a man in heavy blue fatigues, black cap and thick boots came towards me through an icy drizzle that had punctured the morning. His name was Brede Johbraaten, the owner of the camping ground. I asked him about renting a boat to cross to the island, but he said this was still winter, and people did not hire out boats in winter.

  He would answer some questions, though, so we sheltered from the growing rain in a wooden workshop. This man in his mid sixties, a grandfather of three, was quiet at first, but then he began to speak about how he had helped people, dripping and terrified, out of the lake on that terrible day, and a shadow entered our conversation. He had run this campsite since the 1990s, with regular visitors from Norway, Germany and Holland, but the shooting had deeply hurt his business.

  ‘I’m fed up with it,’ he said – a Norwegian understatement.

  As he spoke he became more critical. First, he blamed the police, as people often do when tragedy arrives unbidden, because we need to blame someone. He said they had been too slow to respond, too disorganised. But so rare are mass shootings in Norway that you could understand why there was such confusion.