by Iain Overton
He had two messages that caught my attention. First, he criticised the media for deceiving the American public. Then, he said that US laws were being used to the advantage of political elites.
On the issue of left-leaning hacks he grew invigorated. You knew the media was lying, he shouted, because they still call themselves journalists. It was an intriguing finger to point. After all, the NRA are masters of the art of inflammatory disinformation. They talk about the ‘spillover’ of border violence and homicidal immigrants – without acknowledging the harm that US guns cause south of the border. They see the perceived threat of terrorism as underpinning the need for American citizens to bear arms,57 even though in 2013 only sixteen US citizens were killed worldwide from terrorism.58 The same year there were 32,351 firearm deaths in the US.59
Having said this: what do you expect? The NRA are lobbyists. Of course they exaggerate, just as liberal lobbyists will portray an opposing view. It’s the nature of the beast. But there was one thing that, when it came to the media, I did find pernicious, and that was the NRA’s stifling of legitimate, independent research.
In the 1990s there were serious attempts by the US government to look at the impact of gun homicides. But the NRA’s position, then as now, was that this was an ‘abuse of taxpayer funds for anti-gun political propaganda under the guise of “research”’.60 The tipping point seemed to come when Art Kellermann, a medical researcher, found that guns kept at home were significantly more likely to be used to kill a family member than to be used in self-defence.61 The NRA response to this was to crush any dissenting research.
They focused their attention on Centre for Disease Control (CDC) funded gun research.62 Lobbied by the NRA, Representative Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas, pushed through an amendment that said: ‘None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control.’63 The CDC’s funding was slashed by $2.6 million, the same amount they had spent on gun research the year before.64
These effects are long-reaching. A pioneer in the field of injury epidemiology, Dr Garen Wintemute, who had his CDC financing cut in 1996, told the New York Times: ‘The National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress have largely succeeded in choking off the development of evidence upon which . . . policy could be based.’65
The NRA have choked other things, too. They were behind a 2003 governmental edict that said the ATF, the body that regulates firearms, could not give out to researchers any data about the tracing of guns involved in crimes. They were also there when the FBI was told they had to destroy records within twenty-four hours after Americans passed a gun background check.66
But it was not just an information war that the NRA was fighting. LaPierre also used the podium to lambast Washington’s abuse of political power. He talked about the law in the US being ‘selectively enforced’, clearly with an eye on Obama’s desire to impose some form of gun control to reduce events such as Sandy Hook. This accusation concerned me.
After all, the NRA has major political clout in its own right. Eight US presidents have been lifetime members.67 All but three of the forty-five American senators who torpedoed gun control measures in Congress in 2013 had been paid by gun lobbyists.68 And, according to the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, the NRA and the firearms industry have pushed over $80 million into political races since 2000.69
The impact of this lobby can often be seen in the absence of, rather than the presence of, politics. The US firearms industry is remarkably unregulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission – a US government agency that protects consumers from ‘unreasonable risks of injury or death’ – does not have the authority to regulate guns, while the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act means that gun manufacturers are shielded from many product-liability lawsuits. So toy guns may have mountains of regulation to reduce the risk of them causing fatal accidents,70 but real guns have no federal safety standards at all – even though American children are sixteen times more likely to be unintentionally shot and killed than children in other high-income countries. It was a cruel conundrum that was down to the singular power of the firearms lobby.
It goes further. Cigarette manufacturers are not allowed to market directly to children, but gun manufacturers very much are. Keystone Sporting Arms’ Crickett rifle is sold as ‘my first rifle’, using a cartoon cricket as its logo. The NRA offers shooting camps for kids and publishes a magazine called NRA Family InSights, with a special section for under-eights. All of this ignores the fact that gun injuries send about twenty American children to hospital every day;71 that in the US guns kill twice as many children and young people as cancer, five times as many as heart disease and fifteen times as many as infection.72 And it was in this painful conjunction of child deaths and political power that I found the NRA’s lobbying influence truly bewildering and painful.
The trees bore the memories of what had happened here. Other towns in this part of Massachusetts wore the pleasures of Hallowe’en happily. Ghouls and goblins were bought in bulk at Walmart, and the cartoon horrors of the American gothic imagination were given full reign. From trees hung grinning skulls or glowing pumpkins.
But not here.
This year the decorations were tamed in Sandy Hook – ribbons replaced skeletons; there were lights instead of dripping blood – because less than a year before, Adam Lanza had killed twenty-six children and teachers at an elementary school just up the road.
Driving into Sandy Hook felt like entering a forbidden territory. I had wanted to go there and walk the streets, browse shops and speak to locals about what had gone on here in the winter days of 2012. But I could not leave the car. I felt like an intruder, and a cheap one at that. Perhaps I had been to too many of these silent streets by now. The memories of Finland and Norway still remained. What had started as journalism had shifted into something darker, and I felt I had no place here.
I passed the school, and there was a sign outside. It was a construction site now, and no unauthorised vehicles were permitted to enter – they had pulled it down. I carried on driving until I had passed the outer reaches of the town. There I parked and walked into a local coffee shop.
The Starbucks of Newtown is, for the most part, unremarkable. A poster of Edward Hopper’s Night Hawks hangs on one wall, a brightly coloured collection tin for the ‘Faith Food Pantry’ stands to the side. I walked up to the manager, a bald and smiling man. He quickly realised why I was there and immediately said he was sorry, he couldn’t talk; he would be uncomfortable speaking to me. He echoed my own feelings there and then.
I had come to this particular coffee shop because here, less than a year after the shootings, over two dozen gun rights supporters had converged to voice their appreciation of Starbucks’ policy not to ban firearms in its stores. Some came wearing camouflage and packing pistols. They were to be disappointed. It was shut – a sign read: ‘Out of respect for Newtown and everything our community has been through, we have decided to close our store early today.’
Their actions, though, became national news. Locals were outraged. Elsewhere Starbucks had drawn plenty of criticism from anti-gun groups for allowing people to openly carry guns in its stores in states that allowed it. But for pro-gun owners to come here – here, where the soil still lay freshly turned on graves too small to look at – to make a political point? That was unfathomable.
I struggled at times like these to find any common ground with the pro-gun lobby. And it was not the only thing that gun lobbyists did that was offensive to some. Two groups even scheduled an event called ‘Guns Save Lives Day’ for 14 December 2013 – the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.73 Another gave away guns to residents in Orlando, Florida, just 20 miles away from where neighbourhood watcher George Zimmerman controversially had shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
There might be outrage in such actions, but spotlighted shootings in the US follow a depressingly similar patte
rn. Demands are sounded for action to address the availability of weapons. The debate runs quickly up against a wall of opposition on the right to bear arms. And the pro-gun lobby wins the day.
Elsewhere in the world mass shootings have provoked governments to introduce ways to prevent future mass shootings. After the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, the British government brought in stricter gun controls.74 When fourteen were killed in Aramoana, New Zealand, lifetime gun licences were replaced by ten-year ones. The massacre of sixteen in Erfurt in Germany in 2002 led to the screening of buyers under the age of twenty-five for psychological concerns.75 And in the mid 1990s in Australia, the Port Arthur massacre led the Conservative government to ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons as well as initiate a nationwide gun buyback scheme.76
These laws worked. Firearm homicides in Australia dropped 59 per cent between 1995 and 2006. In the eighteen years before the 1996 laws, there were thirteen gun massacres resulting in 102 deaths. Since the introduction of their laws there have been no massacres.77 In 2008 to 2009, there were thirty-nine fatalities from crimes involving firearms in England and Wales, with a population about one-sixth the size of America’s. In the US, there were about 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2008.
The US, though, is different. It is the only country in the world where, following a mass shooting, the nation has responded with loosening, not tightening, gun laws. After twenty-one people were killed in a mass shooting in Texas in 1991, the state pushed through a law permitting the carrying of concealed weapons. Other states followed.
Even the massacre of Sandy Hook saw a call for more, not fewer guns. Twenty-seven American states since that fatal day have passed ninety-three laws expanding gun rights, including measures that let people carry concealed weapons in churches.78 Some schools even allowed their teachers to go armed.79 So fearful were many US firearm owners about gun control that they bought up millions of rounds of ammunition. In fact, they bought so much that the global supply was impacted – even Australian ammunition stocks ran short.80
The NRA’s response to the horrors of what had unfolded in the quiet town of Sandy Hook was more guns, not fewer. They backed a ‘school shield’ proposal – improving school safety by calling for armed guards in every school.81 ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,’ LaPierre told reporters.82 One month after the Newtown massacre, the ‘NRA: Practice Range’ app, which tests shooters’ accuracy, came out.83 The app was originally recommended for four years plus.84
The sober reality of all of this is that in the eighteen months before Sandy Hook there were seventeen deaths recorded nationwide in seventeen documented shootings at US schools. In the eighteen months following Sandy Hook, forty-one deaths were recorded in sixty-two incidents: a rise of 141 per cent. There has been a steady rise in the last decade of mass shooting incidents in the US.85
So powerless do many Americans feel about their ability to prevent mass shootings that an Oklahoma company has come up with a solution. They sell bullet-resistant blankets to protect schoolchildren – an 8mm pad that they say protects against 90 per cent of all weapons used in school shootings.86
What the gun lobby’s work amounts to: a nation where schools buy bulletproof blankets for kids.
My attempts to understand the unique relationship with the gun in American culture had led me far across this broad and windswept land. From talking to gun shop owners in Arizona to gun control lobbyists in Washington, survivalists in Arizona and peaceniks in Manhattan, I had sought to understand a little about why the US is so enamoured of the gun. The roots to this lay deep in the soil here, deeper than I could ever dig.
But the trail had led me to the Orange County Fairgrounds in Middletown in New York State. So it was, on a cutting November morning, I pulled my coat hard around my shoulders and walked the length of a massive warehouse that ran parallel to a long line of pick-up trucks and rusting 4x4s. Fifteen dollars and you were in, free to stroll between the yellow signs that rose from the trestle tables. ‘Guns wanted,’ they said, ‘Buying guns, Parts, Ammo.’
It was a county gun fair – just one of thousands held around the US every year, and a family atmosphere hung around it. Fathers ate hotdogs with their sons, grandfathers talked to granddaughters about shooting bears. In one corner a woman with a bullet earring and a camouflage T-shirt was eating, without looking, from a packet of Doritos. A poster behind her read: ‘I’d rather be judged by 12 men, than carried by 6’.
Yet, despite the home-loving feel of this place, there was something else that was troubling here. It wasn’t the incongruity of the Chinese sellers, with their neatly laid-out tables of laser-sights. It wasn’t the M16-shaped BBQ lighters, or the knife called ‘The Redneck Toothpick’. These things did not disturb. Rather, it was the table with the spoon on it.
More specifically, it was the table with a spoon with AH engraved on it. Adolf Hitler’s spoon, found in 1945 by a US Airborne lieutenant called D. C. Watts, and now yours for $400.87 The spoon was nestled beside a row of other Nazi objects: a greeting card from Hitler – ‘Der Führer des Großdeutschen Reichs’; Eva Braun’s calling card.
I looked up and saw another image. This one slightly different; it had hollow eyes and a pockmarked face with drooling lips. A $4.99 Nazi zombie target. I write this because the image stayed with me. Then, as now, it struck me that the Nazi zombie was somehow significant in my journey into the world of the gun. That it was, in a way, the perfect lobbyist in this world – indestructible evil personified. It was, at least, the perfect reason to own a gun – combating the zombie apocalypse.
I had seen them throughout gun shows in America: zombie targets, T-shirts and costumes. There was the Zombie Max bullet.88 There were zombie survival camps.89 Outdoor Life magazine even ran a ‘Zombie Guns’ feature – ‘the only way to take ’em out is with a head shot’.90
Dwelling on this zombie metaphor might seem extreme, but in the US zombie culture is massively popular. The second-season premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead, a series about surviving in the face of an apocalyptic world, was by far one of the most popular programmes in the US; Season 4’s premiere night later attracted over 16 million viewers.91 The immensely popular Call of Duty has a zombie mode. Nazi zombies have starring roles in films such as Zombie Lake, Dead Snow and Zombies of War.92 And zombie walks, where people dress in the clothes and make-up of the undead, have been seen in twenty countries, with up to 4,000 participants at a time.93
This zeitgeist has even had political impact. When in Florida a state senator in 2014 proposed a bill allowing people to arm themselves in a state of emergency, it was rejected by another senator, who dismissed the gun-toting bill as ‘An Act Relating to the Zombie Apocalypse’.94
The zombie metaphor has been taken up by the pro-gun lobby, too. In October 2013, hundreds of armed pro-gun rights men rallied at the Alamo in San Antonio. There, Alex Jones, a controversial radio talk show host, took to the podium, an assault rifle across his back. He outlined a worldwide conspiracy to take away everyone’s guns, calling those who advocated basic background checks ‘pathetic zombies . . . stupid victims that want us to live like they do, slaves’.
Why this obsession with the undead, I wondered? I was concerned that my thoughts on this would incur ridicule, that the gun nuts would tear me apart, so I sought higher help.
It came in the form of an academic called Christopher Coker. A professor at the London School of Economics, Christopher had written articles about zombies and combat and was happy to meet.95 His room was a Wunderkammer of delights, filled with Chinese Maoist propaganda puppets, Russian dolls with the heads of the Taliban painted on them and West African voodoo dolls. He had taught there for thirty-two years and looked impossibly young for a man of fifty-six. Perhaps luckily for me, he also agreed with my zombie observation. There was something to it, he said.
‘West Point cadets read zombie books now; it’s penetrated the American military to a remarkable degree.’ Outside
his door hung a news cutting. The US Defense Department had a disaster preparation document called CONOP 8888. It was a zombie military response document – developed to train commanders preparing for a global catastrophe. The briefing stated, clearly, ‘this plan was not actually designed as a joke’.96
I asked Coker what it was about zombies that proved so attractive in the world of US guns.
‘First of all, you’re not dealing with creatures with any moral personalities,’ he said. ‘You can shoot as many as you like. It’s just open fire, and there’s no moral conundrum. This has to be seen through the perspective of the War on Terror. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Taliban and Al Qaeda were actually zombies?’
But he put its attraction as much deeper than just psychotic soldiers and gun-nuts. ‘Paranoia is extremely important in the gun culture and the NRA . . . America’s just paranoid about enemies within. It’s always the enemy within. It starts with the Brits, with Benedict Arnold. Whom can you trust? Compare that to zombies – your neighbours can turn into zombies through contagion. That’s why you need a gun – to defend your family against your neighbours, essentially.’
Its roots were deep. ‘That paranoia comes from Calvinism. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Catholic or an atheist, Calvinism deeply permeates the American imagination. There are demons here on earth – they’re not waiting in hell. Americans live continually with the idea of fear, and that I think is a very primal fear. It’s very much a part of the American psyche. It could be zombies, it could be another AIDS virus. It could be terrorists, of course.’
It reminded me of the 1991 film Cape Fear, by Martin Scorsese, when the private investigator Claude Kersek says: ‘The South was born in fear. Fear of the Indian, fear of the slave, fear of the damn Union. The South has a fine tradition of savoring fear.’
