Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (25 page)

Guns are fun. I have no doubt about that. When used in the right way and in the right place, they can bring great satisfaction and pleasure. And by ‘the right way and in the right place’, what I mean is in a controlled and safe manner in a situation that threatens no one.

Of course, with these Faustian caveats a diabolical world of debate is conjured up. People argue endlessly about what constitutes ‘control’, what is meant by ‘safe’, and who is threatened. Many believe they
are
in control, they
are
safe. And what potentially despotic government has the right to say that you can’t protect yourself?

Civil liberties aside, though, I had to consider guns and their non-lethal use in the pursuit of such things as sport, pleasure and self-defence. After all, in 2007 it was estimated about three-quarters of the 875 million guns in the world were in private hands.

Of course, the numbers of civilian guns varies from nation to nation. From places where every other person has a gun, like Yemen, to lands where there is less than one gun for every 100 people, as
in South Korea or Ghana.
¹
But overall the numbers of civilian-owned guns are distractingly large. India has about 46 million privately held firearms, China 40 million and Germany 25 million.
²

As ever, it is the US that takes the prize, with almost one gun per person.
³
Put simply, if you take India, China and Germany out of the equation, the US, with 270 million civilian guns, has more privately owned firearms than the rest of the world put together.
⁴
No wonder American gun advocates call themselves an army.

But, as with everything related to guns, it’s difficult to trust these figures. Millions of small arms worldwide are owned that are never registered with the authorities. Many are registered but may long ago have rusted away or been stolen. And when you have situations like one where a de-activated gun for the film industry in one country might still need to be registered as a working firearm if exported to another,
⁵
or where, as in the UK, certain air-pistols are included in the firearm count,
⁶
figures cited are bound to be an indication only.

One truth, though, remains constant: when guns are used for sports and hobbies, communities evolve around them. And so a group of gun owners and shooters I wanted to consider were those who would gather to shoot without drawing blood; the groups who shoot socially, or competitively; those who keep guns for their peace of mind; and the cliques who expensively and expansively collect guns.

Perhaps above all of these, though, there was one type of shooter who intrigued me: those who do it for the sheer hedonistic hell of it.

Miss Cambodia had, as she said she would, appeared in a wedding dress and was preparing to shoot. The AK47 was handed to her, ready to fire. She raised the stock to her foundation-heavy face and, leaning forward, pulled the trigger. A sharp crack sounded, and at the end of the range, at the edge of a sharply outlined target of a charging warrior, a bullet left its mark. Wounded certainly, lethally
possibly. Either way, you knew not to mess with a beauty queen with a semi-automatic.

It was 2001, and I was filming an adventure series across Asia; Cambodia was our first destination. Here the presenter, a journalist with the magazine
FHM
, had eaten deep-fried spiders, had his back ‘cupped’ by a traditional healer and taken part in a buffalo race. Now his challenge was to beat Miss Cambodia in a shooting competition, and so we were at the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces’ 70 Brigade Headquarters – the only firing range in this Indochinese country open to a paying public.
⁷
It wasn’t exactly hard-hitting journalism.

The afternoon was heat-soaked. We had driven away from the genteel lanes of the French colonial capital of Phnom Penh, through a bordered world of rice paddies and fields of dry corn, until the distinctive crack of the Kalashnikov was heard, its sound filling the saturated air and echoing out towards the walls of the jungle.

The other visitors here were white tourists – Australians, Germans, Americans, Brits. It was popular to include a trip to a firing range with a visit to the Khmer Rouge-era S-21 prison. So, in the morning, these travellers had dragged themselves around Pol Pot’s interrogation centre – an innocuous three-floored former school, whose balconied walkways and bending palm trees belied its past life. There they stared at the faded photographs of souls killed by genocidal monsters and took pictures of ugly wire torture beds in once fear-filled rooms.

Afterwards they were driven to the Choeung Ek fields on the capital’s outskirts. Here Cambodia’s intellectual elites, teachers, doctors and journalists had once been taken in their thousands to wet mud flats known then and forever more as the Killing Fields. And the Westerners learnt how Cambodia’s leaders had once been killed with an AK47 round in the back of their heads.

After witnessing these horrors, the tourists would then come to this range and shoot guns. Firing thirty rounds from a Kalashnikov cost them $40. For $70 they were able to let rip on an M-60, the US military’s machine-gun of choice in Vietnam. There were other packages for more extreme tastes. Lay down $350, and soldiers would drive you 30 kilometres east to a field in the Kampong Speu province.
There a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher would be hoisted onto your shoulder. For another $200 you could fire it at a live cow. I guess if you can buy sex in Cambodia with a twelve-year-old for $10, then someone renting you a weapon to blow up an animal is nothing.

We were just after guns, though, and so in this languid air-force range we had laid down our dollar bills and lined up to take aim. Dogs roamed outside, instructors stretched idly in fly-touched hammocks or hustled at pool. And, in the heat of the afternoon, Miss Cambodia, Samoni, lifted her rifle again.

Behind her a screaming skull from the Airborne Unit insignia stared down. ‘Mess with the best, die like the rest,’ it read. Vietnam war clichés, I thought, and she fired another round and then another. The paratrooper gun instructor told her to lean into the gun, to expect its recoil. But Samoni had shot before and, as the cameras rolled, her bullets caused the sun-red earth down the range to pop in tiny eruptions, and a smile formed on her rouged lips.

Filming this beauty queen expertly unload a semi-automatic clip into a target was not just a slice of entertainment for television. It allowed us to touch on the terribleness of civil war. You make it engaging so people watch it, as it’s hard to film a mountain of skulls and make it popular. Do it like this, and you get 200 million people watching facts about horror and genocide.

The gun was certainly a way to tell that tale – the Khmer Rouge’s actions had led to the deaths of nearly 2 million of their own countrymen between 1975 and 1979, many of them with Chinese- and Russian-supplied rifles. These armed fighters, wrapped in their checkered
kramas
and communist ideologies, had spread like a virus from the jungles to the rice fields and then into the suburbs of the boulevard-lined cities, until the entire country had fallen under their control.

These men were not just interested in power. They wanted that thing that you should always fear when men have guns – they wanted to make a new society. So they began to dismantle and destroy what had gone before, in the name of a warped agrarian ideal, and the rule of the bullet was marked by the deaths of countless.

Guns flourished. Certainly you wouldn’t have had to come to this military range to fire one. Owning a high-velocity weapon wasn’t even illegal until 1998, and by then every third household in Cambodia was armed.
⁸
But when the Khmer Rouge finally collapsed, the new government realised the revolution’s legacy of arms was fuelling criminal violence. So they introduced tougher gun laws and a massive buy-back scheme. Within sixteen years over 180,000 weapons had been destroyed. The local English newspaper, the
Phnom Penh Post
, was to report that guns had declined from being behind 80 per cent of all violence in 1994 to just 30 per cent a decade later.
⁹

That’s why you had to come to a range to fire one. But shooting with Cambodia’s beauty queen was more than just entertainment. There was a peculiar truth present in that moment: a truth of just how quickly guns, even ones touched by genocide, can be used by tourists for fun, how quickly, in a stranger’s hands, a gun can shift from something feared to something desired.

Cambodians did not come here to shoot. Only tourists came here to pick up Uzis and Glock pistols and Thompson machine-guns, the remnants of Cambodia’s colonial and subverted revolutionary past. The pleasure these guns gave to foreigners was not diminished by what these guns had done.

I understood why. There was a time when I enjoyed guns for the pleasure they brought, and that alone. I used to be the head of a small gun club, a ramshackle affair of a wooden hut and a few tons of sand, where we shot rimfire .22 rounds on bucolic summer days. As a teenager I learned how to fire pistols and target rifles; I was trained to strip down a General-Purpose Machine-Gun in seconds. For a brief part of my youth, I even bought print magazines with names like
Guns & Ammo
. But then I began to travel to war zones and lands touched by the gun’s deadly sting. Guns lost their allure, and the memory of what they can do to a man took the pleasure from them. And I turned, in the terrified moment of that killing, from enjoying what guns brought to me to looking at the harm they brought to others.

For many, though, their view of guns has never been tainted in such a way. For them the gun is almost a way of life.

‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’

These twenty-seven words make up the Second Amendment, a constitutional right to bear arms that for many in the US lies at the heart of what it means to be an American. They have had an impact far deeper than was probably ever intended and have led to a country saturated with guns. A 2012 Congressional report found there to be about 310 million firearms there.
¹⁰
Of course, not every American owns a gun – about two-thirds of them lie in the hands of just 20 per cent of gun owners.
¹¹
But in the Land of the Free, consumer logic has taken gun ownership to its extreme. Under US law, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System is used to see if someone can buy a gun from a dealer before they can walk out of the shop with it. The figures show that system received almost 157 million applications for guns between 1998 and November 2012.
¹²

What those twenty-seven words also created was a situation where the gun is vibrantly visible in American culture. In some states, it’s a culture that has evolved into laws that let you carry a gun into a church or onto a college campus,
¹³
or laws that say it is not a misdemeanour to shoot someone in self-defence if you are drunk.
¹⁴
In some places they even permit you to sell a gun to a fourteen-year-old.
¹⁵

It’s a right to bear arms that is also vigorously defended. Even modest gun controls – like proposals for background checks – are seen as dire infringements, ones that pave a lacerated route to despotism, because the first thing a tyrant does – so the theory goes – is take away the opposition’s guns. It means when a Missourian Republican, in all seriousness, wanted to make it a felony for his fellow lawmakers to propose new gun control laws, he was not laughed out of office.
¹⁶
And when the city council of Nelson, Georgia,
once tried to pass a law to make it illegal
not
to own a gun, the response of many was support, not shocked bewilderment.
¹⁷

At first, like many Europeans, I did not understand such things. I found it easy to sneer at America’s love for the gun. But then I travelled across the broad width of this complicated land and, from diner to boardroom, listened to dozens upon dozens of gun owners. And from them I learned one central reality: that you cannot understand civilian gun ownership in the US without acknowledging the heavy burden of history and violence on the American psyche.