Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (11 page)

Then there are those two groups who seek a darker form of power – for whom death is the thing they seek. Killing not as a by-product of protection, or defence, or desire, but death as a means to its own powerful end. These are the mass shooters: all too often young men who go on the rampage and kill in a single, public event. They defy the normal motives for violence – robbery, envy, personal grievance. They ignore basic ideas of justice.

Or the assassins. That rare breed of cruel men who are paid to kill, and for whom money cannot be the only reason they do this job, because you can always earn a living doing something else.

Mass shooters and assassins: two groups I felt had to be the first things to write about when I shifted my gaze away from those whose lives were lived and ended at the end of a gun and entered the world of those holding the gun in their hands.

The snow was beginning to fall on that September day in 2008 when I walked through a muffled forest that surrounded a small town in western Finland. I had travelled out to the creeping edge of Kauhajoki and there, caught within an endless line of trees, was trying to find a rifle range. A place where a now-dead man had been filmed a few days before, shooting at targets, and where his poisonous words foretold a horror.

I had left the road ten minutes earlier and cut into the claustrophobic woods and was now lost. The sound of my feet breaking the frozen ground cut the quiet. Thoughts about the Finnish wolf and bear, out there beyond the corridors of trees, distracted me. And then, ahead, between the pines, I saw the outline of a wooden shooting range.

The cracking of the leaves startled the man. I first noticed him as he began to turn; his coat blended well with the leafy surrounds. Then I saw the rifle loosely cradled in his arm. This was not the time, nor the place, to meet a stranger with a gun.

A few days before, a young Finnish man, a twenty-two-year-old called Matti Juhani Saari, had done the unthinkable. He had walked
into his college and killed ten people. Saari had gone on the rampage about 5 miles from here, at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality. He had crept into the university buildings through the basement and, armed with a Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol, wearing a balaclava and dressed in military black fatigues, had gone upstairs. He acted as if he was on a combat mission, but he was the only enemy in this quiet Finnish town.

At 10.30 that morning Saari had walked into an exam room, filled with his fellow students taking a business studies paper, and opened fire. He approached his victims one by one, shooting each at close range. He then stepped into the corridor, loaded a new clip and returned to kill his teacher. He slowly moved around the classroom, delivering a vicious
coup de grâce
to whoever made a sound.

After he had killed, Saari called a friend to boast about what he was doing. He then poured petrol onto the crimson-stained floor, dropped a match and walked outside, the fire rising behind him. As the flames rose, nine classmates and one teacher lay dead and eleven more injured in the cruel flickering. Saari watched the rest of the students running, screaming, out into the thin light of a Finnish autumn, then he shot himself in the head.

With a total of eleven people now dead, it was the deadliest peacetime attack in Finnish history. Saari had fired 157 shots, sixty-two of which later were found in the bodies of his victims.
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Twenty rounds were in one person alone.

One bullet, the least lamented, was the round he used on himself.

With that final shot his pistol also sounded the start of a different race, a race for journalists to get to the scene, to report on the terror created by that most modern of things: the mass shooter.
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I happened to be in Oslo at the time and, because news desks in London do not think: ‘It would take him seventeen hours to drive there, and it’s 700 miles away,’ but rather: ‘Norway is close to Finland, so let’s send him,’ they called me.

‘Get packing. We’re going to send you to Finland.’

And that was it. I was with Jenny Kleeman, an up-and-coming journalist, and we were reporting for ITN on Norway’s immense oil wealth. We were analysing Oslo’s sovereign investment funds when
we got the call, and death was the last thing on our minds. But a day later we had flown (not driven) to Kauhajoki, a place forever marked by what had unfolded there and one that left its mark on me – because it was my first encounter with the grotesque realities of mass shootings.

We hit the ground running. My editor back in London was hungry for facts about why Saari had done what he had done, and we quickly learned that the troubled killer, in the weeks leading up to the incident, had posted several videos online under the username ‘Wumpscut86’. His terrible message: ‘You will die next.’ The videos showed him firing his Walther P22 at a local range.

That was why I was lost in that wood. I was at that range – Saari’s last location captured on film. The young killer was dead, but at that moment no one knew who had been behind the camera – an accomplice, even? I looked down at the man’s rifle, and my mind clouded with the possibilities.

The man turned and stared intently. Then he tutted. And I realised what I had first mistaken for rage was actually annoyance. Saari had just filmed himself, and this man was not going to kill me. He was just bothered that I was here, stumbling about in the forest with my video camera. Because my presence, in this remote province of this little-visited country, was a clear signal to him of what was to come: a bloody media spectacle.

The modern mass shooter and the modern media are intrinsically linked. Columbine, Dunblane, Sandy Hook: journalists, responding to the final performance of a lone shooter, have ensured that these place names are forever marked. In news ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, so the saying goes, and that evening the news the world over led with the blood Saari had shed and the name of Kauhajoki. Bulletins showed the rows of flickering candles and teddy bears outside the school. Images of the Finnish emergency services standing around awkwardly were transmitted across the world. And the shooter’s vicious videos and his ugly testimonies were replayed endlessly.

Of course, this was a big story, not only because it was the second mass shooting that Finland had had in two years, but also because it was the death of young, hopeful white people. Such things are
important in Western news agendas, because prejudices and priorities dictate the amount of airtime a story is given – what has been called a ‘hierarchical news structure on death’.
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A white shooter killing twenty kids in the US will dominate the global press. Twenty black adults dying in a hail of bullets in Nigeria will barely register. And when it comes to mass shootings, schools will always get more coverage than anywhere else, even though in the US businesses are almost twice as likely to be the blood-soaked epicentres of mass shootings.
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What it means is that, while mass shootings may only constitute about 1 per cent of all gun deaths in the US, their impact in terms of headlines and column inches is profound.

Some say it is too much, that the media’s saturated coverage of a mass shooting encourages others to carry out copycat attacks – tortured souls seeking to burn out in a blaze of infamy.
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They have a point. In 356
BC
, a Greek called Herostratus torched the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was, contemporaries wrote, an attempt to immortalise his name.
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And it worked. The fact we know the arsonist’s name, the destroyer of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, shows us that terrible crimes can achieve eternal fame. In the same way we know the names of Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Behring Breivik and, possibly in small part because of my efforts, Matti Saari.

This idea that the media can influence extreme behaviour is perhaps best illustrated by looking at the time when newspapers agreed to cooperate with the authorities following a spate of suicides in the 1980s subway system in Vienna. Negotiations led to local Austrian papers changing their coverage by avoiding any simple explainers as to why someone threw themselves in front of a train, by moving the tragic stories off the front page and keeping the word ‘suicide’ out of headlines. Subway suicides there fell by 80 per cent.
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This led some to ask: ‘Would the same happen if there was a media blackout on mass shootings?’ Certainly there have been very vocal critics of the media’s saturation coverage of some mass shootings. A forensic psychiatrist told ABC News the airing of the Virginia Tech killer’s video tape was a social catastrophe: ‘This is a PR tape
of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character . . . There’s nothing to learn from this except giving it validation.’
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Others have said that the gory details of shootings help ‘troubled minds turn abstract frustrations into concrete fantasies’.
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Perhaps these things are true. But the media’s focus also highlights things like the inadequacies of existing national gun law. The fierce coverage of Kauhajoki, for instance, encouraged the Finnish government to reduce the number of handgun licences and to raise the minimum age of gun ownership. The media helped do that.

So, when journalists descend on a sleeping town where lives have been shattered by the sharp retort of gunfire, they should tell themselves they are there to report on these horrors for one reason and one reason only – to try to stop this happening again. Not to titillate, but to warn.

We thought of these sensitivities as we lined up outside the school’s entrance that night – a straight run of white broadcast trucks in front of pools of candles and stunned locals. Then London called, and we were on-air.

In 1966, a twenty-five-year-old ex-marine called Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas tower. He carried with him three rifles, three handguns and a sawn-off shotgun. By the time he was killed a few hours later, Whitman had shot forty-eight people, sixteen of whom died, and the world was introduced to a very unique, modern monster: the mass shooter.

Of course, the terrible visitation of mass death on schools and offices is not just an American tragedy. The deadliest mass shooting was by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011, where sixty-nine died in a shooting spree, and a further eight lost their lives in a bomb blast. Before that, the world’s deadliest attack by a lone shooter was in a small farming community in South Korea. There, in 1982, a policeman called Woo Bum-kon killed fifty-six. His rampage was triggered when the woman he was living with woke him from a nap; she had swatted a fly that had landed on his chest.
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Despite these global killings, the greatest media focus is on those carried out in the US. An Associated Press list of twenty of some of the ‘deadliest mass shootings around the world’ featured eleven US attacks.
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It’s been calculated that there have been over 200 such incidents in the US since 2006.
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And if you define a mass shooting as one where at least four people are wounded, not killed, then in 2013 there were 365 American incidents: a mass non-lethal shooting every single day.
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It’s also seemingly getting worse. According to the FBI, the rate of deadly mass shootings went up from one every other month between 2000 and 2008 (about five a year) to over one per month between 2009 and 2012 (almost sixteen a year).
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Of the dozen deadliest shootings ever to have taken place in the US, half have been since 2007.
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Of course, the media focus not just on the numbers killed and the frequency of the killings, but also on the people who wielded the guns. People ask: ‘Who would do such a thing?’

It’s difficult to give a definitive answer. The US secret service looked at the phenomenon of mass shooters and concluded there was no single ‘profile’ of a school shooter. Each shooter differed from others in numerous ways. Despite this, there is a consensus that some trends exist. In 2001 a study looked at forty-one adolescent American mass murderers: 34 per cent were described as loners; 44 per cent had a preoccupation with weapons; and 71 per cent had been bullied.
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Other traits seem to dominate, too.