by Iain Overton
Across the dancing waters lay the endless spread of America, and I thought how much things had changed. Today Lady Liberty still stood for freedom – but it was a different form of liberty than that which Bartholdi had perceived. Now it was wrapped up in the logic of the American Second Amendment’s right to bear arms: a right conceived in an age of simple single-shot guns, not ones that could decimate a school playground in the blink of an eye. Any questioning of this right came up against a barrage of opposition – a stone wall of lobbyists, manufacturers’ political donations and silent moneyed men.
It was a logic of the right to bear arms that had spread far from America. US guns ended up fuelling drug wars in Central America and Mexico, and vicious conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. Second-Amendment-quoting lobbyists had hobbled international attempts to address the spread of illicit guns worldwide. And the logic of American mass production meant that far more guns were being made than were ever being destroyed.
I had come to the end of my journey. Behind me lay a battered landscape of memory – the worlds of pain, power, pleasure and profit. What I had seen was that the gun’s impact on lives – our lives – was divided into dozens of different realities. That communities living with guns at their epicentres often lay far removed from other communities with other guns. Gun lobbyists never got shot at, while gang members rarely got to meet politicians. Gun makers focused on the minutiae of a barrel’s width, while doctors frantically focused on stemming the blood from the imprecise holes caused by a bullet’s spin.
This divided world was the root of the gun’s hold over us. We could never get rid of its ability to impart pain, because doing so meant taking away someone else’s power, their pleasure and profit. Those who say guns don’t kill people, that people kill people, just haven’t seen the whole picture. They have only seen one element of its transformative power. Yet I had seen all of the varied faces of the gun, and to me it was unequivocal – guns kill.
Transformative: this was the essence of what guns were. They took man’s basic impulses and stretched them, from the pinnacles of empowered wealth and desire to the depths of pain and war. They could turn an argument into a deadly confrontation. Make you give all your attention to a man you wouldn’t, shouldn’t give a second thought for. Save you and sink you. Of course the gun gives us freedom, I thought. Freedom to do as we want – or for someone else to do as they want to us.
That was the horror.
From the tomb-like arsenals of Brazilian armouries to the sun-touched mountain heights in South Africa, I had seen guns transform situations, people, ideologies and even me. It had left me on edge, spread thin. I felt fearful – death had left its secret mark; wars don’t end just because you are not there. And I feared the future. I anticipated the criticism this book might bring – angry words from those wedded to their right to own a gun.
But I had seen what I had seen, been marked by it, and it felt as if words were the only thing I had left. And yet that fear somehow left me, for a moment, here. I looked up at the looming Statue of Liberty and down at the worn grass that surrounded her. On one patch some central European teenagers were sunbathing. A man sat on another, slowly unwrapping a silver-foiled sandwich. Here was peace.
A thought struck me: despite the inalienable right to own a gun in the US, you cannot go to this emblem of America armed. Liberty Island is a federal property, and National Park rulings ban all weapons. Tourists join long, slow queues on the New York shore and are herded through airport security scanners to make sure no guns are brought here. This has created an island that has virtually no crime. The United States Park Police were unequivocal: ‘We located no statistics of any firearms incident on the Statue of Liberty National Monument from 2000 to the present.’ This, despite about 20 million visitors travelling there over that time.
It was possibly the safest public space in the world.
I looked around at this artificial vision of freedom and breathed out slowly. What the world might be if we had no guns at all, I thought. And then the sun flared, and the light grew and filled the sky.
What the world might be.
NOTES
Chapter 1: The Gun
1.
In 2012 in the whole of London, a similar-sized city, there were less than 100 murders. If you look at Brazil’s death rate in terms of its ratio, it has the fourth-highest rate of gun deaths in the world – about 19.3 per 100,000 people. It’s estimated about 95 per cent of these are homicides.
2.
In a study conducted by the NGO Viva Rio, 11 per cent of the 10,549 guns seized from criminals in Rio de Janeiro state between 1998 and 2003 once belonged to the military police.
3.
The Small Arms Survey estimated a figure of 875 million guns, but this was in 2007. As more guns are produced than destroyed every year, almost a billion guns seems a fair estimation. Other facts from: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2007/en/Small-Arms-Survey-2007-Chapter-02-summary-EN.pdf; http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2012-05-30/ammunition-trade-tops-4-billion-yet-little-regulation-control-and; http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/weapons-and-markets/producers.html; http://child-soldiers.org/global_report_reader.php?id=562/; http://allafrica.com/stories/200706140975.html
4.
http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/military-history/art30537
5.
Maxim was, of course, an American resident in Britain. As for the mechanism of firing: in most instances, it starts inside the bullet, where a propellant, such as gunpowder, lies. Ignite this and you produce a force. As this propellant burns, gases are released that generate intense pressure. This pushes the bullet down the barrel of the gun – the thing that gives a gun its ‘bang’, like the uncorking of a bottle. As the bullet flies through the air, gravity and air resistance reduce the bullet’s speed and trajectory. Over short distances, the bullet more or less travels in a straight line. But over bigger distances, the bullet flight path curves downwards. The more streamlined and pointed the bullet is, the more easily it will travel through the air.
6.
It was a weapon that had had some of its initial military trials in Sandy Hook in the US – a town later to become synonymous with another rapid-firing rifle used in a horrific elementary school killing.
7.
Ian Fleming initially armed his spy with the .25 ACP Beretta Modelo 418.
8.
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2007/en/full/Small-Arms-Survey-2007-Chapter-02-EN.pdf
9.
Ibid.
Chapter 2: The Dead
1.
http://www.gunbabygun.com/gun-baby-gun/global-numbers-killed-gun-examined/
2.
http://www.genevadeclaration.org/measurability/global-burden-of-armed-violence/global-burden-of-armed-violence-2011.html
3.
http://www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/docs/Indicators/Public_Health_Approach_to_Armed_Violence_Indicators.pdf
4.
http://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs/2014_GLOBAL_HOMICIDE_BOOK_web.pdf – this reports states that firearms account for four out of every ten homicides at the global level but offers no data to back this claim up. The Small Arms Survey estimates that 90 per cent of deaths in conflict are from guns, so saying five out of ten homicides are gun-related seems a reasonable estimate.
5.
http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-gun-policy-and-research/publications/IPV_Guns.pdf
6.
http://www.globalissues.org/article/78/small-arms-they-cause-90-of-civilian-casualties
7.
Interview with World Health Organization suicide researchers.
8.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/06/11/gun-violence-and-mass-shootings-myths-facts-and-solutions/; http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2001.html; http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm
9.
&
nbsp; http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/15/san-pedro-sula-honduras-most-violent; according to the Citizen Council on Public Safety and Criminal Justice, nineteen of the twenty cities with the highest homicide rates in the world are in Latin America.
10.
M. Peden, Second Annual Report of the National Injury Surveillance System. Violence and Injury Surveillance Initiative, South Africa: October 2001. Cited in: http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/8/4/262.full#xref-ref-5-1
11.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/sep/17/gun-crime-statistics-by-us-state.
12.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list; http://pt.igarape.org.br – over 34,000 people being killed by firearm in one year has been recorded, three times that of the US gun homicide rate.
13.
Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (NAUH). Across Honduras, between 2005 and 2012 there was a 93 per cent increase in the homicide rate – from 46.6 per 100,000 to 90.4 per 100,000: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html
14.
Honduras is 283 per cent worse than the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. There were 7,172 homicides in 2012 there. This is a rate of 90.4 per 100,000. The average rate that year in Latin America and the Caribbean was 23.6: http://aoav.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Crime-and-Violence-in-Latin-America-and-the-Caribbean.pdf; US deaths stood at 5.2 in 2011: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
15.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/15/san-pedro-sula-honduras-most-violent; data shown to me by the San Pedro Sula morgue showed there to be 1,971 homicides in the region of San Pedro Sula in 2013 – data published on www.gunbabygun.com
16.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119026/guns-fueling-immigration-central-america-come-us
17.
This is for ‘Regional San Pedro Sula’ – data from the Ministerio Público and posted on http://www.gunbabygun.com/gun-baby-gun/san-pedro-sula-data-dangerous-city-earth/
Chapter 3: The Wounded
1.
http://www.propublica.org/article/why-dont-we-know-how-many-people-are-shot-each-year-in-america – these numbers include only injuries caused by violent assault, not accidents, self-inflicted injuries or shootings by police; http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
2.
http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/Seven-people-treated-gunshot-wounds-Plymouth-s/story-22761113-detail/story.html
3.
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-kingdom
4.
http://www.childrensdefense.org; the comparison numbers work out at 32,223 in Iraq and 15,438 in Afghanistan (from US military personnel wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan as of 5 March 2012; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2008-2009. ‘Fatal Injury Reports.’ Accessed using the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS). US Department of Health and Human Services).
5.
Marie Crandall et al., ‘Trauma Deserts: Distance from a Trauma Center, Transport Times, and Mortality from Gunshot Wounds in Chicago’, American Journal of Public Health, 103, 6 June 2013, pp. 1103–9.
6.
One South African study showed up to 40 per cent of trauma patients arrive at hospital in their own vehicle or in other modes of transport. In other parts of the world, it’s been estimated this figure might be as high as 90 per cent.
7.
A study published in November 2013 showed that clothing presented a greater risk of indirect fracture and a greater severity of those fractures produced. It also suggested that clothing increases infection rates, as the clothing is drawn into the wound, ‘acting as a nidus for infection’; http://www.josr-online.com/content/pdf/1749-799X-8-42.pdf
8.
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0100-72032013000900008&script=sci_arttext
9.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1072751509016184
10.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/159/7/683.full
11.
http://www.irinnews.org/printreport.aspx?reportid=79241
12.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1570575/
13.
‘La Méthode de Traicter les playes Faictes par Harquebutes et Aultres Bastons de Feu’. Paré also developed ways to tie off veins and arteries, making thigh amputations possible, and was one of the first to note how maggots could be used to clean wounds.
14.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/florence-nightingale-passionate-statistician
15.
http://www.historynet.com/minie-ball; http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/the-bullet-that-changed-history/?_r=0
16.
https://www.armyheritage.org/education-and-programs/educational-resources/education-materials-index/50-information/soldier-stories/290-civilwarmedicine
17.
http://afids.org/publications/PDF/CRI/Prevention%20and%20Management%20of%20CRI%20-4-%20-%20History.pdf
18.
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/people/josephlister.aspx
19.
Vincent J. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli: The Spanish-American War and Military Medicine (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 30.
20.
R. M. Hardaway, ‘Wound Shock: A History of Its Study and Treatment by Military surgeons’, Mil. Med., 169, 4, 2004, cited in http://afids.org/publications/PDF/CRI/Prevention%20and%20Management%20of%20CRI%20-4-%20-%20History.pdf/view
21.
http://afids.org/publications/PDF/CRI/Prevention%20and%20Management%20of%20CRI%20-4-%20-%20History.pdf
22.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zs3wpv4
23.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1570575/
24.
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/war.aspx
25.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/st-marys-adopts-army-tactics-to-save-lives-of-gun-and-knife-victims-8893928.html
26.
http://www.thelancet.com/crash-2
27.
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/how-simple-new-invention-seals-gunshot-wound-15-seconds
28.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death.html
29.
http://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Abstract/2014/01000/Unrelenting_violence___An_analysis_of_6,322.2.aspx; a total of 6,322 patients were treated and inpatient costs were put at $115 million.
30.
http://journals.lww.com/annalsplasticsurgery/Abstract/2012/04000/Outcomes_of_Complex_Gunshot_Wounds_to_the_Hand_and.11.aspx
31.
http://journals.lww.com/annalsplasticsurgery/Abstract/2012/04000/Gunshot_Wounds_to_the_Face__Level_I_Urban_Trauma.12.aspx
32.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12616051
33.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-21/shootings-costing-u-s-174-billion-show-burden-of-gun-violence.html; http://www.pire.org/documents/GSWcost2010.pdf
34.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2013/01/14/how-guns-and-violence-cost-every-american-564-in-2010/
35.
World Health Organization and World Bank, World Report on Disability (Geneva: WHO, 2011). A 2005 survey revealed that fewer than half of all countries had gun violence rehabilitation programmes.
36.
R. L. Leavitt (ed.), Cross-cultural Rehabilitation: An International Perspective (London: W. B. Saunders, 1999), p. 99.
37.
World Health Organization, Community Based Rehabilitation: CBR Guidelines (Geneva: WHO, 2010).
38.
http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/research-kenya-who-pays-price.pdf
39.
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ficap/resourcebook/pdf/monograph.pdf
Chapter 4: The Suicidal
1.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2743457/WHO-calls-action-reduce-global-suicide-rate-800-000-year.html
2.
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29060238; http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide_datasheet-a.pdf
3.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-account-for-most-gun-deaths/
4.
Across the US, in 2010, the gun suicide rate was 6.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 3.6 per 100,000 for gun homicides: http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/dataRestriction_inj.html
5.
According to the WISQARS Injury Mortality Report, Alaska has a rate of 15.34 per 100,000 population, New Jersey has a rate of 1.94 per 100,000 population.
