by Iain Overton
Alone, these images could be dismissed, but seeing row after row of them, I began to feel insanity creeping in. Profit here was infused with murderous intent. One company was selling sweatshirts with ‘One Shot, One Kill’ above a grinning skull. Others based their marketing on a quasi-Christian Templar iconography, like that of a crusader’s skull next to the motto ‘In Hoc Signo Vinces’ (‘In this sign we conquer’). The Holy Cross had been turned into a sniper’s reticle. Another advert showed a shadowy figure, antlers sprouting from his forehead, a cup dripping with blood in his left hand – the stuff of Aleister Crowley. But the skulls these marketeers used were always bleached and intact. They were not the bullet-cracked skulls I had seen in San Pedro Sula, with their green and mottled flesh.
John Hollister, with his black T-shirt, shaved head and white goatee, looked the part in this alternative world. But he was not here buying. He worked for Advanced Armament Corporation based out of Georgia and sold silencers. ‘We are a lifestyle,’ he said, pointing to the logo of a skull above a pair of crossed AR15s fitted with silencers. ‘We once had a deal where, if you got that image tattooed on you, you’d get $1,000 credit from us. Two hundred and fifty people got tattoos in that first week.’
This was supposed to be a counter-culture, and yet even that had been appropriated, like so much here, by the logic of corporate capitalism. John said his office email signature read: ‘A lifetime member of American Gun Culture’. And it was not just John who had this corporatised passion.
It was a profit-driven gun culture that was also at the heart of what Ed Strange, the manager of a company called Wicked Groups, did. Ed, like John, had a long goatee and wore lots of black. His arms were a patchwork of tattoos. He marketed his Michigan company as the ‘Bad Boys’ of gun grips. They customised the handles of pistols for people who wanted a mark of their individualism on their sidearm. But despite all the choice of customized art, he mainly sold two images – the US flag or the skull. His biggest customers were US soldiers spending their hazard pay or law enforcement officers pursuing private passions. And they were almost always white men. ‘In this industry, I can’t think of a single company that is African American,’ he said.
This marketing of skulls, though, bothered me. It seemed as if death was abstract and saccharine. A bloody fashion accessory. And where there is death, there is always sex. ‘Make Love Loudly, Make War Silently,’ said the logo for a silencer manufacturer. The sexual marketing here was unreconstructed. Images of women in low-slung dresses holding cigarettes lined some of the booths. The scantily clad Hotshot Girls were out there in the mêlée, signing calendars. A Czech gun company had dressed up its pistol-toting models in bikinis and feathered wings and called them Guardian Angels. And the gun manufacturer Glock had once taken this a step further and given its regional sales reps an assignment: go to a local strip club in Atlanta and pick out the best-looking girl there, they said. She can promote our new pistol at the show. And they did and she did.18 I went over to their pavilion – filled with men taking steady aim with Glock’s ever-popular pistol range – and asked for an interview. I wanted to ask them about this marketing tactic, as well as plenty of other things, but they just said they’d have to get back to me.
Patriotism was also present in swathes. The advertising dragged you back to the idea of liberty again and again. Freedom Munitions bore the tagline: ‘Freedom starts here’. Satellite phone networks sold ‘Freedom Plans’; $1,499 gun safes were called the ‘Freedom Model’. The Stars and Stripes was appropriated in ways that demeaned not elevated it. Old Glory was used to sell everything from sniper optics to ‘Kill ’em, Grill ’em’ ammunition.
There was more than a whiff of Islamophobia as well. I had seen three target companies selling life-sized shooting mannequins dressed in keffiyehs and bishts. Mission First Tactical’s stand had a poster on its glass partition of an American soldier in a desert, his head bowed. Behind him stood a woman in a burka. They were surrounded by phrases like ‘I am a warrior’ and ‘I will always place the mission first’.
Of course, there were lots of outfits not bedecked with skulls and crosses, Mom-and-Pop concerns that had a much more considered approach to gun sales. But it was not moderation I was looking for. America’s gun violence was immoderate, so my eye was drawn to its cultural peripheries, where I found a marketed obsession with death, faith and the flag.
But beneath the muscular Christian nationalism was a hard corporate reality, one without patriotic sentiment. No matter how much you wrapped the US flag around guns, you could not ignore the fact that three of the five top firms at this show were not American.19
This dichotomy was summed up by one image that repeatedly caught my eye. Framed photographs dotted around commemorated Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK47. He had died a year before, and one photograph had a huge floral wreath of blood-red roses around it, placed upon a stand of two AK rifles. ‘One of the greatest and most influential firearms designers of our time,’ it read. It gave pause for thought. Here, in the heart of America, stood lavish memorials to a gun designer whose work had taken so many American lives, yet no one was protesting that fact. Six decades ago this would have got you dragged in front of the McCarthy hearings. Now it seemed the main person disturbed by the AK47’s legacy had been Kalashnikov himself. He had, before his death, written to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church regretting his involvement in the twentieth century’s greatest killing machine.20 But here, it was business as usual.
It was intriguing. Was the allure of the gun so strong that the icon of communism and anti-America materialism – the AK47 – could be so easily embraced? To answer this question, I set up a meeting with Thomas McCrossin. He was the general director of the Russian Weapon Company and had just signed a deal with the company Kalashnikov Concern for the distribution rights of their rifles to the US. It gave McCrossin the chance to sell 200,000 Kalashnikovs every year from sea to shining sea, and I wanted to ask him about the image problem there might be in doing that.21
He greeted me with a suspicious look. A sombre middle-aged man in a cinereous suit, he extended his hand and gave me that terrible handshake men sometimes do. The one when they force their hand to be the dominant one, above yours. I let him do it because it was a weak psychological trick, and it said more about him than me, and we sat down in a grey cubicle office that stood beside his company’s rifle-lined stand.
Looking back at our meeting now, I still find it hard to decipher what he told me. The conversation was filled with leaden words such as ‘private investors’, ‘consolidation’ and ‘exclusive distribution’. I asked how many sales he hoped to make. ‘Leave that be,’ he said with a push of his jaw. Instead, he talked about market levels returning to normalcy, artificial growth and ‘sportarised’ versions of rifles. Perhaps it was the windowless office, the blandness of his voice or my jet lag, but it was like skating on a clouded ice-rink in an ashen light. Imprecise, vague and elusive corporate-speak. The bloody realities of what these rifles had done, and could do, were reduced to a drab sales pitch. He then said he had another meeting and gave me his dominant handshake again, and I walked away, wiping my hand as if removing a stain.
Almost immediately, I stumbled across a far more modest stall. In many ways, it was the very thing I had been looking for – here was someone who might be able to tell me, without a PR officer getting in the way, about a world that was still hidden. One of exports and deals, shipments and arms trading – how guns get around the globe.
Unlike the other outfits at the show, this one was spartan: just a desk and a banner that read ‘Hurricane Butterfly’. It was a small company run by a Chinese-American called Jason Wong. Trim, with a precisely ironed blue shirt and military-cut hair, Jason could have been an insurance dealer or an auditor. Instead he dealt in guns. His operation helped internationally trade firearms for those unwilling or unable to do it themselves.
‘I get export licensing. I consolidate products. Then we ship,’ he sai
d, leaning back in the way men do when they are comfortable with what they do. ‘I’ve sold about $5 million worth of guns. My industry is recession-proof – we sell to the entire world. This is a growth industry – it’s not going away.’
In many ways he did the boring stuff. Things like facilitating shipments and securing end-user certificates, documents that certify the buyer is the final owner of the guns, not just someone just planning on giving them to a rebel group or a terrorist cell. It was no surprise to learn that Jason was a once a lawyer. In this world you need someone who has that focused patience in order to tell the difference between a DSP-83 form and a BIS-711. He claimed he has a 97.8 per cent success rate in DSP-5 export permit approvals. I had no idea what that meant.
But the things he sells are far from dull and orderly – and so he has to contend with the perpetual scrutiny that he gets from the State Department, from US Customs and Homeland Security, all of them sniffing around. And he has to deal with the public’s perception of his job.
‘When people hear what I do they get scared. “Have you seen Lord of War,” they ask? No, I haven’t. I’m not interested. I only sell to the good guys,’ he said.
He exports to over twenty-five countries. ‘There is a proscribed countries list,’ he said. ‘We can’t export to Syria, North Korea, Iran, the Ivory Coast. So I sell to places like Guatemala, so its citizens can buy guns with the hope it prevents a civil war in the future. This might sound counter-productive, but if only the government has guns, then how are you going to fight it?’
I asked him how he could be so sure the ‘good guys’ get the guns. After all, guns exported by Hurricane Butterfly could get siphoned off, fall into the hands of the wrong people. Surely this is what happens when a butterfly flaps its wings – it causes a hurricane on the other side of the world?
‘Diversion is a naughty word. Does it happen? Yes. If it happens, it is usually US government sanctioned. A lot of things go on that people aren’t aware of. The assumption is that weapons going to Syria are just for the bad guys. But if we’re going to talk about Syria what we’re talking about is Russia’s relationship with the West. And it’s not like the US government’s going to issue an export licence to the rebels in Syria. I know of colleagues that were asked to legally supply arms to the rebels with US government sanction and foreign government investment. The US government is always interested in how the US government can get weapons into foreign zones and they have to come to someone like me.’
‘Someone like me’ – the world of the middlemen summed up. The corporate, articulate, besuited quietude. The neat world that lay between the pounding of a producer’s weapon-making machines and the angry retort of those weapons used in anger. A world peopled by men who worked in clean, carpeted, well-lit offices, men with starched collars and cut fingernails who never raised their voices. As C. S. Lewis said, ‘Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.’
In the end Glock never got back in touch for that interview. It was a pity. I had questions to ask about what processes they went through when deciding what guns to sell and who to sell them to. I wanted to know more about how hellish bureaucratic police states got their weapons, and whether Glock could convince me that it was not a thoroughly nasty business concern.
I had my doubts.
On 1 September 2012 Corporal Dwayne Smart, a police officer in the Jamaican Police Force, killed Kayann Lamont. He was trying to arrest her for using ‘indecent language’ – a crime in Jamaica. She struggled, and eyewitnesses claimed that Smart shot her twice in the head. He then allegedly shot and injured her sister. Some were later to say he was in the middle of reloading his weapon to finish her off, when another officer intervened. It was to emerge that Kayann was eight months pregnant when she died. Corporal Dwayne Smart was charged with her murder.22
The thing that drew me to this ugly story was that Kayann was shot with a Glock service pistol, one most likely bought by that Caribbean state in 2010, possibly from a Glock subsidiary or agent.23 So what, you may say. Gun companies make guns that kill people – it’s self-evident. But Glock is a little different. The Austria-based company has become the leading sidearm of choice for police forces around the world, and the question that has to be asked is: does this company take into account who it really sells to?
The gun company has had resounding success in the US. Glock itself boasts that up to 65 per cent of America’s police departments put a Glock pistol ‘between them and a problem’.24 Given that almost 1,500 people were reported killed in police interactions in the US between 2013 and 2014, it’s pretty certain that some of those died at the end of a Glock.25 And not just in the US.
Glock pistols appear to have found their way, perhaps even without Glock’s knowledge, into a number of countries with major issues surrounding their human rights records – places like Iraq,26 Belarus,27 Azerbaijan28 and Israel.29 It raised for me a specific concern that I wanted to ask Glock about: how much they, or their subsidiaries, took into consideration a nation’s police human rights abuses before a contract was signed. Did they sell Glocks to the Jamaican police, for example, and – if so – did they know that force had been plagued by accusations of extrajudicial killings?
After all, Kayann Lamont was just one of 219 people killed in incidents involving the Jamaican security forces in 2012.30 And Jamaican human rights groups have repeatedly been vocal about the need for more accountability over the use of firearms by members of their police and army.31
It is not just Jamaica’s controversial police force that I wanted to talk about either.32 In 2013, the Philippines National Police also reportedly bought nearly 60,000 Glock Generation 4 pistols.33 In fact, another 14,000 Glocks were sold a year later, again to the Philippines National Police.34 As I had seen, the police in the Philippines had a staggeringly poor human rights record.35 Indeed, the police there are so riven with corruption that when the new guns arrived, the Philippines National Police chief reminded his officers that if any of them went out to pawn their guns, they would be charged with a criminal offence.36 Were Glock entirely oblivious to these spectres of corruption and violence?
Perhaps. But that new Manila-bound consignment – predictably – was very quickly to make its visible, deadly mark. In August 2014, an off-duty policeman shot three men outside a bar in La Trinidad, Benguet, killing two of them. The gun used was the suspect’s Glock service pistol.37
Of course, it is not just Glock who are clear that they are in compliance with strict export controls. Other European gun companies have been caught in the spotlight for selling guns to police forces with questionable human rights records.
In 2014 the German arms maker Sig Sauer landed in hot water with the authorities when almost 65,000 of their pistols were sold to the Colombian police via the US. Colombia at the time was on the German government’s prohibited list of export countries.38 In January 2014 the German police also seized documents from Sig Sauer that exposed the sale of seventy guns to Kazakhstan through questionable routes.39 It was ‘a total failure of controls’, said the German Newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. ‘Again and again, German weapons are found in conflict zones. And again and again the weapons manufacturers are totally surprised.’40
Another German gun manufacturer, Heckler & Koch, was also accused of supplying 9,500 G36 rifles to prohibited markets in Mexico between 2006 and 2009.41 The German government had said H&K could sell arms to Mexico provided they did not end up in the states of Chihuahua, Jalisco, Chiapas and Guerrero. There was strong evidence that the police in these states had carried out ‘disappearances’ and extra-judicial executions.42 But the Mexican Defence Ministry said they were unaware of the conditions attached to the rifles and so delivered the guns to the prohibited areas.43
The interesting thing is that Glock, Sig Sauer and Heckler & Koch were all working within legal parameters. In the European Union, weapons exports should, according to the law, take into account the ‘r
espect for human rights in the country’ they are shipped to. The trouble is that ‘respect for human rights’ is not clearly defined. And the gun companies’ lawyers were adamant their clients adhered to the law.
But, as the Shot Show proved, getting direct answers to direct questions was hard. Harder than meeting an El Salvadoran assassin, harder than getting shot at. The situation is that, in general, detailed arms sales data is kept from the public eye, a lack of transparency that might even be bolstered by gun companies’ often-close relationships with armies and police forces.44 It means the effective scrutiny of arms transfers is sometimes impossible. We often know an arms sale has happened only after someone is killed by a gun from that trade.
In the European Union, where most of these gun companies are based, this lack of transparency is pervasive. Member states are obliged to submit data to the EU on arms transfers. Yet the quality and quantity of this data is far from perfect. In some years, France, Germany and the UK fail to make full submissions.45 And Austria, home of Glock, has no published data on the UN arms register for six years in the last nine. Outside the EU it’s as bad. US government information involving the export of 59,904 pistols from the American subsidiary of Glock to the Philippines was not released because the publication ‘could cause competitive harm to the United States firm concerned’.46
If I could not get gun companies to respond to me, I figured I would just have to go to them. So the frustrating combination of silence and the opaque transference of arms led me to arrange a press pass to another type of gun show that intrigued me – the military arms fair.
‘Welcome to Hell’ said a flyer on the exhibition magazine. In the early June heat of a French summer, it seemed apt. There is something about the endless grey carpets and high spotlighting of convention centres that saps your time and then your soul. Row upon row of people hunched in their cubicles, staring at their laptops or at you – each partitioned by thin stall walls and each displaying an even thinner animosity for their competition. This was Eurosatory – the largest defence and security event in the world, with over fifty countries and 1,430 exhibitors selling the most advanced weapons systems man has dreamed up.
