Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun
Read Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun Online
Authors: Iain Overton
Tags: #Social Science, #Criminology, #Anthropology, #Cultural
GUN BABY GUN
A Bloody Journey into the World of the Gun
IAIN OVERTON
Published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2015 Iain Overton
All photographs © Iain Overton
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 78211 342 3
Export ISBN 978 1 78211 343 0
eISBN 978 1 78211 344 7
For G.
For S.
For A.
In memory of my grandparents
Carolina Bernal (1917–2014)
Pablo Antonio Bernal (1919–2014)
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION
1. THE GUN
Brazil – a murder in São Paulo – a child’s sorrow and a dead mother – the descent into a police arms cache – a revelation – a journey conceived – Leeds, UK – a secret museum and a meeting with an expert – to a Swiss canton to visit an oracle
It began with a death.
The five-year-old had lain alone with his lifeless mother all night long, curled up at her cold feet. It was only when the thin light of dawn lifted some of the darkness from the bedroom that the neighbours had heard the boy’s cries. And only then did people realise what had happened in those sunless hours before.
The bullet had entered the left side of the young woman’s temple and exited at the back of her head, splattering flecks on the leprous wall. There had often been wild-voiced arguments in that cramped house, but no one ever thought it would come to this.
After the boy was found the police arrived quickly, but the murderous lover had already fled that Brazilian city and, like the gun he had used, he was nowhere to be found.
By the time we reached the quiet roadside home the child had also been spirited away, covered in a blanket – lifted from his dark
pietà
and carried out into the light. His mother was still inside.
Cars passed, leaving São Paulo for the north, and we stood awkwardly and watched them go. They slowed down and watched us too, a huddle of cops and a documentary crew crowded beside a
white ambulance that was never really needed. A dog barked in the distance, and I took out my video camera and walked inside.
The dead woman had run a small shop out the front, and it was filled with packets of coloured sweets and warm bottles of luminescent drinks. On the counter was a tray of Catholic pendants, which she had sold to the weary lorry drivers who would stop here. But these plastic icons had not helped her last night, and now she lay beyond, past a dusty glass counter, down a narrow corridor, there in a pool of silence.
They say death smells sweet. That’s what I thought as I walked into her bedroom. A taste touched my mouth and reminded me of the orange-tinted bottles that lined the shop’s walls or the citrus chocolate puffs that lay neatly arranged in their shiny little packages. The air was thick with this smell. It had been over twelve hours since she had died, and this was the start of summer.
Her name was Lucicleide, and she was naked. I was not expecting that, but death rarely grants us dignity, so her breasts hung to the side and the rest was uncovered. There was not much blood, save for a smear above her pinched, sallow face. Finding a corner, I set up my tripod and got to work; the police did not tell me to stop filming, but by now I was not even sure why I was doing this. My footage would never end up on the evening bulletins. The film I was making with Ramita Navai – an Anglo-Iranian journalist who was used to witnessing such things – was about the toll of violence in one of Brazil’s deadliest cities, but Britain’s
Channel 4 News
could never show such intimate and murderous detail.
I felt I had to do something, though.
So I focused on her unfurled hands and on the trinkets that lined the top of her chipped cabinet and shifted the lens onto the face of a purple bear I imagined her lover had once bought her. And the whirr of the tape in the camera took the edge off the awkward quiet of the room. I carried on filming until the forensic examiners wrapped her in a heavy blanket, and all I could think of as she was lifted heavily up, covered like her son had been, was how hot it was to have such a blanket to sleep under.
We followed the body out into the light and slipped back into
our car. Then, after waiting for the coroner’s van to slide away, we too pulled out and drove south, following an unhurried squad car back to the city’s police headquarters. And none of us spoke.
The building was low-slung and squat, built in the way Brazilian architects love: concrete, slats and shutters. Municipal chic that was made markedly less chic and more threatening by the armed police stood behind its long glass front. The steps leading up to it were broad and shallow; they twisted in an arc and made the walk to the doors of justice a slow one.
An image of São Paulo as a dystopian city, something out of a
Judge Dredd
comic, came to mind. This was its rigid heart of order and legal retribution, but policemen stood, their arms cradling dull metallic weapons. The reason for this was clear. In one year alone there were over a thousand gun murders in this city, in waves of crime so violent they had caused schools to close and municipal bus routes to change.
1
It was small wonder that this governmental building was so foreboding. Dozens of police officers had been killed, caught up in the endless drug wars that blighted this land. The guards at the entrance were taking no chances. They were heavily armed – police assault rifles slung across their riot shoulder pads and bulletproof vests lying underneath.
Passing through scanners and scrutiny, we emerged on the other side. There we were met by Colonel Luiz de Castro. A short man with dark, tightly cut hair, a firm jaw and a precisely ironed shirt, he looked like someone born to be in the service of the state. Greeting us with an iron handshake, he was quick to address why we had come here: to see São Paulo’s seized-gun repository.
‘A few years ago we had a gun amnesty,’ he said as if delivering an order, his voice a staccato drumbeat. ‘Here we have about 20,000 weapons confiscated or handed in. We offer between $50 and $100 for each one.’
The colonel spun on a heel and led us at pace down a long corridor, lit by naked and glaring fluorescent strips. The sandpaper walls here were bare and the floor scuffed, and as we descended slowly into the sodium-coloured belly of this bureaucratic beast, the
colonel walked ahead, his boots sounding the mark of his passage. Then he stopped at a grey door and motioned us inside. Beyond lay a small room with a few computer terminals, in front of which sat uniformed officers. They were inputting data and looked up at us with the eyes of people whose lives were spent in rooms without sunlight. Across from them lay a caged door.
The colonel called out, and a shadowed face appeared; keys were turned, and the door swung outwards. We walked into the semi-darkness.
Beyond lay thousands of guns. Every surface was filled with them – the walls lined with wooden, narrow boxes, like a mail-sorting office, each pigeonhole containing a gun with a small paper label attached. Space here had run out long ago, and the guns spilled out onto the counters and the wooden chairs that spread across the floor. A door led on to another room and then another, and the scene was the same in each.
There were semi-automatics from North America; hunting rifles from China; a 9mm pistol from Germany; an old blunderbuss from England. There were home-made handguns and high-tech machine-guns. Black guns so corroded with time you imagined them wielded by slave owners in long-shut-down plantations. There were even some with
Polícia
stamped on them, because when Brazilian gangs kill a policeman the prize is that downed cop’s sidearm as well as his life.
2
Then it struck me how, like the clichéd six degrees of separation, this graveyard of guns was somehow more significant than just what was visible in this narrow space. Each gun here, either through maker or victim, shooter or seller, was somehow linked to a bigger story – each connected to the outside world in a deeper, more nebulous way.
Here were revolvers bought with taxpayers’ money and ordnance left over from long-forgotten wars. Police pistols and army handguns, sports rifles and hunting shotguns from all over the world, many of them tainted with the stain of murderous deeds. The microcosm of life – of law and protection, violence and vengeance, leisure and provision – was laid out in these shadows.
In a sense this lair of guns was a symbolic image for all of the human rights tragedies I had ever been trying to explain as an investigative journalist and a human rights researcher. And the idea for this book was conceived in that moment – a desire to trace the gun’s pathway from its metallic cradle to its blood-tinged grave. A journey to discover the lifecycle of the gun and, in so doing, to understand a little bit more about death and maybe, even, a little about life.
There are almost a billion guns in the world – more than ever before. An estimated twelve billion bullets are produced every year. Over a hundred countries have their own gun industries, and twenty nations recently saw children carrying guns into conflicts. In this new millennium, AK47 rifles have even been sold for as little as $50.
3