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

by Iain Overton

  So why does it seem somehow, then, that men’s deaths in Juárez are given less importance, less media focus, even less sympathy? It’s as if we assume any man killed by a gun in Mexico somehow deserved it more than a woman. But assuming all men murdered there were narcos or gang members is ludicrous. There are the countless young Mexican men pulled off street corners to work as halcones (watchers), their lives snuffed out just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something they shouldn’t have. Certainly as many of these ‘innocent’ men were killed in Juárez as women were. Focusing on the bodies of women as the victims in the bitter landscape of Juárez’s violence serves only to address a small part of the overriding problem. As Molly said: ‘If you look at the problem of violence in Juárez as essentially being a problem of young women being murdered, and that if you can solve those murders, then everything will be OK, it feels safer. It feels like you can accomplish something, because then you don’t actually have to look at the real problems of the city.’

  Ignore the killings of men, though, and you risk not finding any real way to address the violence committed by them and against them. You risk the malady of eternal violent repetition. And not just in Juárez – it is all over.

  And yet . . . and yet. The answer to reducing gun harm is not as simple as just denying men access to them. After all, guns can be used as much in the preservation of life as in the taking of them. And the male urge to protect is, as I had seen on a trip to Asia, a very primal one.

  I was to meet someone recommended to me. A true Pakistani gun enthusiast, I had been told. A man you have to meet – someone who has so, so many guns to protect himself and his family. Why, I had asked. Because the Pakistani state can’t protect them. So I called, and he said, ‘Yes. Come over.’

  This was off the cuff. I was in Lahore mainly to talk about the levels of terrorist violence that had impacted this country of 180 million. There were rounds of press interviews and launches to attend on a campaign that my charity was running, seeking to highlight the plight of victims from the rising tide of suicide bombings. But being here, in a country so beset with murder and death, and one infused with machismo and paternalism, I felt compelled to speak to a man who owned guns, because the idea of armed self-defence in a nation where the need for it was so stark intrigued me.

  Modern assault rifles and handguns had long ago come into vogue among middle-class male Pakistanis. They bought them because they had lost faith in the ability of the country’s civilian government to protect them. They had seen the assassinations of its popular political leaders, a spreading Islamist insurgency and daily terrorist explosions, and so they prepared themselves for the worst. But more than this, Pakistanis feared the hidden threat of violent kidnapping, extortion and robbery. The murder rate here was 53 per cent higher than in the US.32 And the man I had agreed to meet was more exposed than most: he was a Christian, a father and a journalist, all of which brought with them their own challenges.

  So, long after dusk had fallen and with the headlights of my car piercing the corners of a crowded suburb of Lahore, I travelled with a local guide to meet Mr Asher John, the chief news editor of Pakistan Today. The mad rush of Lahore’s busier streets, with its ramshackle shops and pulsing electric lights, gradually eased off, and we entered a quieter section of shaded corners and suburban calm. Security guards, wrapped in thick shawls to keep out the night chill, stared from the gloom. Then the car beams picked out the nameplate on his home: John’s Lodge. After a beeped horn, he came outside.

  In his mid thirties, Asher was trim and balding and wore a neat moustache. He looked like a typical father, with his jeans, checked shirt and sandals, and he ushered me into his modest home with the mild insistence that comes with Pakistani hospitality. There, underneath a mounted display of a deer’s head, he offered me a Coke and sat and waited for me to ask him a question.

  I began by wondering why he had developed such a reputation as a man who knew his guns.

  ‘If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun,’ he answered, in the peripheral way that many Pakistanis do. The low light caused by weak electrical power, one that marks the nights of this region, gave the conversation a conspiratorial edge.

  ‘Gun violence in Pakistan is pretty common, you can get shot in the rural areas, you can get shot on the roads. In Pakistan, we’re used to seeing people getting shot, and we’ve ceased really caring about it. Beheadings are something not common: that makes news. People getting shot is everyday.’

  He had more to fear than most, though. At thirty-six, he had been a journalist for thirteen years, and his beat was a dangerous one. He mainly reported on blasphemy cases, especially where guns were used in attacks on minorities, including Christians like him.

  ‘There was one time, five months ago, I was being followed from my work,’ he said. ‘We were trying to investigate a Muslim cleric who was raping young boys at a seminary, and these thugs came after us. They said we made the story all up. It was easier for them to say we are trying to malign the cleric, to call us blasphemers, even though we had eight or nine children on record. I had to fire two shots to scare those people away.’

  The lights from outside flared over the high brick walls, and the grilled windows cast prison-bar shadows on the ceiling. I tried to imagine – from a man’s perspective – what it must be like to live with your family in this way, as if there was nothing solid underneath to guarantee their protection. I guess, for him, guns were the base that he stood on, the thing that made him the protector that he wanted to be.

  He brought down a .44 rifle that had been converted into a fully automatic assault rifle here in Pakistan, and handed it over. ‘I don’t know how to make this safe. How do you make this safe?’ I said.

  His phone rang, and he said casually, ‘It’s safe.’

  But it wasn’t. My right hand cocked it to see if there were any bullets in the chamber, but in this dim light I could not see clearly inside, and as I let the cocking lever go the noise of a round being chambered caught his attention.

  ‘Oh. This one’s loaded,’ he said suddenly. Another second and I could have fired a full magazine into his living-room ceiling. I guessed, too, that if you needed a gun for self-protection then there was no point in not having it loaded. He laughed and carried on as if nothing had happened.

  ‘It’s not just a hobby. It’s more of a necessity now. I will train my daughter how to use a rifle, given that we have weapons and we are the only Christians who live in this area. It’s important for each of us to know how to fire a weapon.’ He talked about the violence that marked his village, and how he had lost cousins to a thirty-year-old blood feud over property rights that still haunted his family out in the provinces. It was a disagreement that had always been framed by the presence of guns.

  He had fired his first gun, his grandfather’s shotgun, when he was just ten years old and had bought his first weapon when he turned eighteen: a .30 calibre pistol for protection. Since then his gun rack has felt the weight of new purchases. Today, he has about twenty guns – the number alone a display of strength.

  ‘A local-made AK47 costs around $600 American,’ he said. ‘A Russian one would cost around $1,500 and a Chinese one $1,250. There are foreign weapons, too. These are usually guns that have been stolen from the troops in Afghanistan. There are a lot of weapons coming in from there: M16s, NATO-manufactured AK47s, AK56s. The most commonly used guns we have are local-made ones, though: .34 calibre pistols. You can get anything in Pakistan.’

  Craft production – a small-scale, hand-lathed industry – was a major source of guns in the northern tribal regions of Pakistan; 20,000 weapons were produced every year.33 It was a double-edged sword – these arms both offered protection and posed a permanent threat.

  This man’s dilemma, then, was the eternal joker in the pack of gun control. In a country where extra-judicial killings are well reported and where there are high levels
of gun violence, there is a philosophical justification for arming yourself in order to protect your family. Who could deny this articulate, humane man his right to defend his home? When police forces are corrupt and religious bigotry means that masked men follow you home, the gun becomes more than just a hobby. It becomes a means of survival.

  The trouble, of course, is when this argument for self-protection is used in societies that are fully functioning – in places where there is a trustworthy and well-equipped police force. Then the right to defend yourself arguably needs to be weighed up against the logic that you should undergo rigorous vetting before you can own a gun. But for this man – an infidel in a land of devout Muslims, a journalist in a country where telling the truth can get you killed, a father in a culture where honour killings and femicide are rife34 – having a gun seemed the only choice left. At least to do what a man often feels he has to do – to defend his family.

  This said, though, what happens if you live in a seemingly orderly society and yet still doubt your safety – like those Americans who think their pistols and revolvers are the only thing that can guarantee their security?

  To answer this, I felt that I had to look at the issue of women and self-defence. And so, a few weeks after returning from Pakistan, I found myself travelling back to the United States. This time I was to head to the heart of American politics – Washington DC – there to meet a pro-gun advocate who believed that gun control itself was sexist.

  I had arrived at the café early in west Washington DC and was nursing a hot drink and the beginnings of a cold. Outside, Georgetown’s neat streets pushed out and beyond. This was M Street, as if there were not enough politicians, orators and celebrities to name the streets after them ten times over. In this city, though, where everything is political, perhaps choosing names like this would be a conceit too far.

  I was here to see Gayle Trotter. She was late, and I could not recall what she looked like, so I approached a woman in dark glasses and asked if she was Gayle, and she reacted with wide, fearful eyes. I backed off and sat and listened to the conversation of the bald, bearded man five tables away.

  Gayle was, to me, an important person to speak to when looking at guns through the sexual looking-glass because this mother of six had given testimony to the Senate about why the right to bear arms was a female right to self-defence. Hers was an interesting argument. When one senator questioned her, she shot back: ‘You are a large man . . . a tall man. You are not a woman stuck in her house, not able to defend her children, not able to leave her child, not able to go seek safety.’

  Then she argued that the most important thing about assault weapons for a woman was the way they look. That a big gun gives off the perception that the female holding it has the capacity to kill, rather than forcing her into killing.

  ‘An assault weapon in the hands of a young woman defending her babies in her home becomes a defense weapon . . . knowing she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage.’

  It was, to some degree, the most convincing pro-gun argument I had heard yet. Given that women are so infrequently the perpetrators of gun violence, the idea of them protecting themselves from harm in this way seemed logical. It was even tempting to conceive of a form of gun control that only let women carry arms and not men – though clearly that would never fly.

  Gayle arrived, apologetic. She was a trim and square-jawed woman in her early forties, born and bred in Washington and a lawyer now for eighteen years. This profession had been a calling, of sorts. When she was just eight, her lawyer father, a patriarch of a man and a member of the National Rifle Association, had given her a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary. In it he’d written: ‘In the hope that you will see fit to pursue the law.’ Clearly he was a man who got his way in life. He was now her practice partner.

  Words spilled from Gayle in a torrent, so much so that it was difficult to decipher if it was nerves or just an incredible intellect at work. She made it clear, too clear even, that she was not a violent person and then, and I was not sure why, she told me twice she was not a vegetarian.

  She was intrigued, too – why would I want to go hunting just for this book? ‘But couldn’t that be like the first time you have sex? It’s not going to compare to someone who hunts their whole life.’

  She had a lawyer’s tone to her, always seeking a weakness in an argument, so I kept our conversation tight and asked her about why she had told the Senate that gun control, if it took guns from women, was a violation of women’s rights.

  ‘For me, guns assure that women can be free and equal,’ she said. ‘Without that you are relying on the government, or your husband, or whatever stronger man is around you, to provide that kind of protection. And, you know, women of an earlier generation were saying, “We’re the same as men, and we need to take our rightful place in society,” but sometimes those are the women pushing the strongest for gun control, and then they’re ceding their own personal protection to the government or to stronger people who are in their area.’

  She had a point about the need to consider self-defence in all of this. Even though gun violence against women is often disproportionately covered in the media, American women are still eleven times more likely to be murdered with a gun than women in any other developed country.35 And little seems to be done to stop it – only nine states in the US prevent people jailed for stalking from, once released, purchasing a gun.36 In 2014, it was estimated that there were almost 12,000 convicted stalkers in the US who were still permitted to carry guns under federal law.37

  ‘Women should have the choice of what makes them feel comfortable to defend themselves, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the ability to have a shotgun or an AR-15 or whatever variety it is,’ she said. She had an issue, too, with background checks. ‘If I were being threatened by someone, I wouldn’t want to have to wait a nanosecond to be able to exercise my right to choose to defend myself.’

  Her comments to the Senate had unleashed a storm of sorts. ‘I got threats on Twitter, on Facebook . . . My personal favourite was: “I want to beat you to death with an X-Box.”’

  She had support, though. Her view was shared by other leading voices in the pro-gun movement. Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA and a man who shared her panel at the Capitol hearings, has said: ‘The one thing a violent rapist deserves is a good woman with a gun.’38

  There was a flaw, however, in Gayle’s argument. Many studies have concluded that having a gun in the marital home puts women more at risk than men.39 A national study on the murder of women in Brazil found 40 per cent of women in 2010 were killed at home, compared with just 15 per cent of male victims. It also found that 54 per cent of those women were killed with a firearm.40 And in Canada women are about four times more likely to be killed by their spouses than are men.41

  The situation in the US for women is as dire, if not worse. A global analysis of twenty-five high-income countries with populations over 2 million found that the US ‘had the highest level of household firearm ownership and the highest female homicide rate’. It was described as an ‘outlier’.42 One study there found that a woman’s chances of being killed by an abusive live-in partner was five times greater if that person had access to a gun.43 As an American review of the scientific literature concluded: ‘There is compelling evidence that a gun in the home is a risk factor for intimidation and for killing women in their homes.’44

  It seems guns might well be the problem, not the solution. When it comes to ‘stranger danger’ an American woman is more likely to be raped in a gun-friendly state than in one with a higher level of gun control.45 We know that, in the US, having a gun in the home increases the overall risk of someone in the home being murdered by 41 per cent. But what is shocking is the fact that, for women, the risk of death is actually tripled.46

  Gayle’s armed solution to protecting hearth and kin was one that made matters worse, not better. And yet, despite the statistical realities, the self-defence mantra
dominates. Gun manufacturers sell women the idea that equipping themselves with a gun will make them a lot safer. When Smith & Wesson introduced the LadySmith gun they launched a feminist advertising campaign with it. ‘Refuse to Be a Victim’ the ads said – the appropriate language of empowerment through a handgun.47

  You can now buy assault rifles in lipstick shades of pink; purchase concealed gun-carry ‘designer’ handbags and holsters in leopard-print and snakeskin; get women’s lingerie that holds a pistol; and order novelty T-shirts (one reads ‘Free Men Do Not Ask Permission to Bear Arms’) from websites like www.gungoddess.com.

  It is a sense of armed empowerment that is visible in the rise of all-female shooting clubs and courses, ones with names like Babes with Bullets and The Well Armed Woman; and a rise, too, of the proportion of all women owning a gun in the US: from 32 per cent in 2005 to 43 per cent in 2011.48

  These increases are intriguing when you learn that, in 2010, the number of violent crimes in the US apparently dropped to its lowest rate in decades. ‘The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s,’ the New York Times reported. ‘Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders. In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 per cent last year.’49

  This, of course, can be read one of two ways. The first is that the arming of America’s women has reduced the threat of violence to all. The second is that women are arming themselves against a threat that is itself declining. And in the space between these two conclusions lies the eternal debate that exists over the right to bear arms, regardless of what sex you are – a debate that is as much down to culture as it is to statistics.