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

by Iain Overton

  But it is an odd fear. After all, the general crime rate in the US is on a downward path – 40 per cent lower than in 1980.97 Knowing this, I could only conclude that these concerns, summed up by zombified danger, were sustained by the ever-present threats that permeate America’s news and advertising.

  You could see this fear in so much of the gun companies’ marketing, too. Glock put out a commercial that focused on the role a gun plays in stopping a stranger knocking on your door and raping you.98 The hysteria of the new millennium was used to sell guns, with marketing men highlighting the fear that Y2K would cause mayhem: ‘dogs through starvation will revert to wild beasts’.99 And, of course, there existed the perennial concern that Obama was coming to take away your guns, as summed up by LaPierre in an article on the NRA website: ‘Obama’s Secret Plan to Destroy the Second Amendment by 2016’.100

  How to protect yourself when the zombie apocalypse comes? Huge caches of guns and ammunition, that’s how.

  So lucrative is this cultivation of anxiety that the US firearm industry cites it is a key reason to why so many Americans bought guns in 2013. ‘Fear of a potential rise in crime contributed to unprecedented industry growth,’ one report concluded.101 Profits flow from terror. The number of criminal background checks for firearm purchases jumped 22 per cent in the month following the Twin Towers attacks. In 2012, following the massacres of Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, FBI background checks rose some 82 per cent.102 It was a deep-rooted terror that compelled scared home-owners to keep a pistol under their pillow at night.

  The horrible irony is that such an armed response does not actually make you safer. As the New England Journal of Medicine concluded: ‘Americans have purchased millions of guns, predominantly handguns, believing that having a gun at home makes them safer. In fact, handgun purchasers substantially increase their risk of a violent death. This increase begins the moment the gun is acquired – suicide is the leading cause of death among handgun owners in the first year after purchase – and lasts for years . . . Gun ownership and gun violence [rates] rise and fall together . . . Permissive policies regarding carrying guns have not reduced crime rates, and permissive states generally have higher rates of gun-related deaths than others do.’103

  Despite this, it remains in the interest of gun companies and the NRA to market the lie that you need a gun to save your life. Manufacturers are faced with the basic truth that, unlike fridges or vacuum cleaners, they sell something that is pretty indestructible. They cannot urge their customers to replace old weapons – the ruggedness of their guns is one of their key selling points. So their advertising has to focus on two other things: the accoutrements that you can buy, like sights and bespoke grips, or the protection a gun offers you from the things you fear.

  Adam Smith once said words to the effect that no nation can be happy if the greater part of its citizenry lives in poverty. Perhaps you can add to that: no nation can be happy if they live in poverty or fear, or both. What I had seen on my travels was that the one thing that truly, consistently transformed poverty and fear into deadly violence was the availability of guns. And this easy availability of guns was largely down to two groups: the lobbyists who secured the political will for their sale and, of course, the people who made them. The manufacturers.

  15. THE MANUFACTURERS

  Guns as the first product in history – revelations on manufactured death – the workings of a pistol factory on the Black Sea coast in Turkey – massive gun profits and political influence in New York, USA – gaining access to the hell-dog boardrooms of the world’s largest gun manufacturer foiled

  November 1851 was, by any stretch of the imagination, a remarkable month. It saw the publication of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville; a book seen by some, with its monumental ambition, as the first modern novel.1 It was the month that celebrated the laying-down of the first protected submarine telegraph cable, on the bed of the English Channel, foretelling an era of global communications.2 And, on a London day when the sky at dawn had been the colour of the Thames but was now brilliant and blue, it saw Samuel Colt standing before the bewhiskered and besuited members of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, waiting for them to fall quiet. He had something to show them.3

  Like many American engineers, Colt had travelled to an England entranced by the displays of the Great Exhibition, and it was there that he planned to show off his design.4 What he presented fascinated the crowd: an invention with interchangeable parts.5 It was the Navy Colt Revolver. What captured the greater imaginations of these straight-backed and high-browed engineers, though, was that 80 per cent of the gun had been made on machines: a revolutionary departure from crafted metal gun parts traditionally lathed by hand.6

  By the time that Colt had finished talking, many in the room were won over to this way of mass production.7 The awards board presented Colt with the prestigious Telford Gold Medal, and already the use of this manufacturing process to make guns was spreading from the Connecticut River Valley, where the majority of American firearms were once made, across the US and beyond.8 This production method, defined by its extensive use of interchangeable parts and mechanisation to produce them, became known as the ‘American System’. It was soon to be the central way to mass-produce so many things that define our modern life – cars and bicycles, clocks and furniture. And, of course, guns in their millions.

  It is no coincidence that Remington once made typewriters, sewing machines and cash registers.9 Or that Winchester made handcuffs, dishwashers and toilet flush valves.10 No surprise that the inventor of the Kalashnikov rifle once dreamed of designing agricultural machinery,11 or that the gun maker Glock started off his life designing plastic curtain rod rings.12 The principles of production were all the same – it is just that guns have a very different use than other mass-produced items.

  Colt was at the forefront of this revolution in production. For that reason some have even called his Navy Colt Revolver ‘the very first product in history’.13 And mass-produced it certainly was. Over a quarter of a million revolvers were made, and they soon could be found from the plains of the US to the Russia steppes, from the far tropical reaches of the British Empire to the dusty plains of the Ottoman Empire. It was a design that launched the modern gun industry – enabling firearms to be made in their tens of millions. Colt alone has sold 30 million guns since its founder filed his first revolver patent.14

  The number of guns produced today is eye-wateringly huge. Over 1,000 companies from some 100 countries produce guns and ammunition.15 The exact figures are hard to come by, but the oft-repeated estimate is that about 8 million guns are made every year.16 This might be erring on the low side. Gun makers from just the US churn out nearly 6 million guns annually, and there are countless weapons made in secretive factories in China and Russia whose production we never catch a glimpse of.17

  What we do know is that as many as 100 million AK-pattern weapons have been produced since the 1950s, and about 12 million AR-15 type rifles have been made since the 1960s.18 We know that as many as 17 million Lee Enfield-series rifles and some 7 million G3-pattern rifles have also come off factory lines across the world.19

  The US accounts for at least half of the world’s small-arms production, with seven of the world’s top ten gun producers based there.20 Three American brands – Ruger, Remington and Smith & Wesson – each made over 10 million guns between 1986 and 2010, about 40 per cent of US domestic gun production.21

  Europe is the other major producer. Italy, Britain and France have some of the world’s largest gun manufacturers. On average, Beretta makes 1,500 weapons a day.22 And, of course, there are Russia and China, as well as emerging gun producers such as Turkey.23

  What is clear is just how much money can be made from all of this. In the US, in 2012, the industry tallied up almost a billion dollars in profits.24 In 2013, Ruger had sales of almost $700 million.25 The figures are so large that the US gun industry boasted they were a ‘bright spot in the economy’, having witnessed ‘
two decades of steady increases in gun sales, including five years of record growth’.26

  Unlike ballistic missiles and attack aircraft, the technical barriers to making a gun are incredibly low. The granting of licences and the spread of technology mean that companies can produce guns without expensive research-and-development programmes, estimated to be just 1 per cent of the turnover of more established gun companies.27

  This low level of investment has meant that some gun makers have become inconceivably wealthy. Gaston Glock is a man so rich he reportedly could buy a $15 million horse for the Glock Horse Performance Centre, run by his wife, Kathrin, a woman about five decades his junior.28 The gilded offspring of the Beretta family get sycophantic vanity-pieces in magazines such as The Billionaire.29 Even the infamous banker J. P. Morgan made some of his first profits selling faulty guns.30

  Of course, it is not all plain sailing. The company that made Kalashnikovs endured hard times after a collapse in orders followed the fall of the USSR.31 A flood of knock-offs and poor management drove it into the red, with losses of $50 million.32 Today the iconic gun manufacturer Colt lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis.33 So gun manufacturers, with their lobbying and their marketing, need to continually encourage people to buy more and more of their product. It’s a remarkably volatile market that demands, as I had seen, the marketing of fear and the production of new types of weapons to keep it afloat.

  Innovation is one such thing that some makers turn to in order to generate a profit. Helmet systems have been developed so that soldiers can now point mounted guns by just moving their head. There has been the creation of the ‘supergun’ – where target-locking technology can turn any rifle into an ultra-accurate sniper’s weapon. There is the geo-location system developed by Yardarm Technologies that can remotely fire or lock a gun. And there is the development of weapons that are unnecessarily extreme. One gun system called the Firestorm has a firing rate of 20,000 rounds a minute.34

  There is also the development of ammunition. From non-toxic ammo35 to the creation of guided smart bullets,36 a wide array of vicious forms of munitions are produced. There are shotgun shells that convert your gun into a short-range flamethrower;37 or ‘Subsonic Controlled Fracturing bullets’ that ‘quietly exit the barrel of your firearm, enter your target and then via hydraulic pressure, fracture into razor sharp petals and a base’.38

  Looking at these inventions makes you wonder what sort of people lie behind them – what motivates them and how they justify their work. And so, nearing the end of my journey, I turned my attention to the gun makers.

  Two emails pinged into my inbox in quick succession.

  The first was from A. V. Rockwell, a filmmaker from New York.39 She had been the director of the music video that suggested Paris Lane had killed himself because of the threat of retribution from some gangbangers he had ripped off. Her email read differently from her film.

  Although the video was inspired by Paris’ story, the majority of the events were fictionalized. According to his close friends, no one knows for sure why he committed suicide, but he had no immediate reasons to fear for his life. He did however, have a troubled upbringing. I hope this helps, sorry to have stirred you in the wrong direction.

  So that was it. Not a gang-related thing after all. Just an act of lonely desperation made deadly with a loaded gun. I had been distracted by a manufactured reality – one where suicide was turned into a form of manslaughter and where a young man’s ‘pride’ was kept alive. Perhaps suicide is too ugly a thing to sell records off the back of. In the end, it was another pointless death down the barrel of a gun.

  Then the next email arrived. I had written to the top twenty gun manufacturers worldwide asking if I could have a tour of one of their factories. Smith & Wesson wrote back. ‘The information you seek is largely proprietary, so I am afraid we are unable to help.’ Blaser, the German hunting rifle company, were, at least, honest when they said: ‘We have to be wary of having our name published in a context which could lead to negative association.’ The others just didn’t return my email.

  But this one was different. It was from a Turkish gun maker called Utku Aral. ‘Thanks for your kind mail and interest to our company,’ he had written. ‘You can be our guest . . . I will be waiting information from you.’

  ‘Any spare time in Samsun may well weigh heavy on a traveller’s hands,’ was the guidebook’s damning assessment of the Turkish city of over half a million that lies on the shore of the Black Sea. They had a point. It was a functional city whose tourist office had long since shut down and where, even in summer, light rain and dark puddles marked the grid of its leaden streets.

  Nurey, my driver, did not speak English, but as he drove me to the gun factory he pointed out the few sights there were to see. This port city had once been a trading station for the Pontic kings, the Romans and the Genoese, but there was little to show for it. There was a dull glistening statue of Atatürk – the father of modern Turkey – under an ashen sky. His boat, the SS Bandırma, lay further along, flanked by a row of listless red crescent flags. It gently swayed in a faded harbour speckled with the distant black rectangles of silent container ships.

  We drove on, through roads slick with a thin spread of mud, passing women in tie-dye hijabs darting to avoid the rain. Above us rose crumbling concrete minarets and the silhouetted ticks of off-black birds caught against a clouded sky.

  Then, after a seeming endless row of small shops selling tyres and windscreen wipers and chrome hubcaps, we passed a sign: ‘Samsun Organize Sanayi Bölgesi’. This was the industrial park where Utku Aral’s factory lay. He was the CEO of Canik, Turkey’s leading pistol manufacturer, with a production line of over 80,000 sidearms a year.

  We pulled into the grey courtyard, and I was shown up to Utku’s office. He was not there, so I did what journalists do – and had a nose around his office. The walls were lined with thin shelves, each one filled with mementos from his business trips: a gold man statue from Kazakhstan, a Spanish bull with a bandana collar, trinkets from Israel, the US, Pakistan – a reflection of the twenty countries where Canik’s pistols were sold. Besides them were framed photographs of Utku – dark-suited and serious, displaying his pistols at a gun show, flanked by men in high military caps, and fierce and thickset politicians. I wandered around. On his desk was a picture of a young wife looking serene in a ball gown.

  Utku came in. Wearing a white button-down shirt and chinos, at thirty-two he was already managing director of one of his family firms. With a degree in mechanical engineering from a top university and a corporate lawyer wife, he possessed the self-confidence of a man who was assured of his place in the world. He settled down into a deep leather chair and called for small cups of sweet Turkish tea. They arrived, softly clinking, and, in perfect English, he began to explain a little about his industry.

  Canik was a mid-sized Turkish gun company – the thirteenth-biggest defence manufacturer in Turkey – with a turnover of about $40 million. They produced semi-automatics and sniper rifles, but the main weapons they manufactured were handguns.

  He chose his words carefully, a trait echoed in his neat haircut and precisely ironed shirt. But he needed to be cautious. His company had been born from a government initiative – the East Black Sea Weapon Project. Even now the government had tight controls on him, with frequent checks and endless permissions required for exports and production.

  Having spent time in the Turkish army, he spoke of patriotism. He felt making pistols for the Turkish police force was part of his duty to protect his nation. ‘The volatility of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all of our borders,’ he said, in a singsong list, it bothered him. ‘Do we know who the Syrian refuges coming over our border are? What if they are IS?’ he said, referring to the Islamic militants fighting a twenty-hour drive from where we sat.

  This belief in the right of self-protection led him to sell weapons to Cameroon, Burkino Faso, Thailand, Zambia, South Africa, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Tanz
ania, Peru and Chile.

  ‘If a CEO sits at home, they are not doing their job,’ he said. Last year over 100,000 Turkish pistols were sold into the US. The long arm of the Second Amendment was there again: ‘If the US says “no more” to gun imports, then small-arms manufacturers all over the world are nothing.’

  I asked about corruption in the arms trade. He was surprisingly frank. ‘Corruption exists in our sector as it exists everywhere. Whoever says that is not the case is lying.’ The problem, he said, was when governments were involved in the deals. ‘Yesterday I had a meeting over Libya. There is a UN arms embargo on Libya at the moment, so we can’t export there. But Russia, China – they don’t care about UN decisions.’

  I wondered if this was just smugglers taking advantage, and he shook his head. ‘Everything is done by governments. Taking guns from someplace to somewhere else without control can’t easily be done. It has to be done by a government.’

  He explained how things work. ‘We go to Ghana and we say we want to sell them guns. But Ghana asks for a soft loan from me and says if I give this loan to them they will buy my guns.’ This is how it is – he said – governments secure these big arms deals but then finance them through the back door. ‘This is the game.’

  We spoke for hours, and then, sensing I was keen to see the guns in action, he led me downstairs and out to the testing range. At that moment his biggest buyer was the Turkish police, ordering some 30,000 pistols from him a year, but that contract was hard to win. The police take his pistols and test them, drop them onto concrete from a height, put them into deep freeze and ovens, and then do what is called a ‘torture test’ – leaving them in a salt bath for twenty-four hours and then firing 10,000 rounds from them in a row. They fire 30,000 more rounds if the pistols are being sold to Turkey’s Special Forces units. The men who do the testing are so muscle bound from shooting they can cock their pistols with the strength of their arm movements alone.