Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (27 page)

Others were below, down a small hill. There they stood with focused gazes beside semi-circles of grey concrete markings. The stations from where the clay skeet targets were fired were positioned on each side, and each shooter would, when called, quietly take his place on the concrete roundels. Then they would tense, shout a single call and, following the speeding blur from its trap, shoot the orange discs down in their hurried flight. Across the ground a thousand splinters of clay were strewn – the satisfying remnants of success.

Crack went the rifles and then, if a second target was let loose, a crack would ring out again across the empty bay. Twenty-five targets in each round, five rounds in total – each downed target a point. The shooter who hit the most won; 125 points was the maximum but few achieved this perfect score.

Guðmann Jónasson, a forty-year-old plumber, was up next. He had been shooting for ten years, and the sport defined his life. His fiancée was also a shooter and held the title of national female champion. Jónasson too had won awards. He was willing to sink almost a million kroner a year into this weekend diversion with its English-bought shotguns and 24-gram rounds from Sweden. Today he was not on best form. He had scored 59 points out of a possible 75. The man in the lead was on 67. Telling me this, Guðmann shrugged his tracksuited shoulders and smiled. In a land where a volcano might wipe your home out, there is always that sense of perspective, I guess.

‘We have the most shooting grounds per capita in the world. You know Copenhagen?’ Guðmann said, rotating an empty Styrofoam coffee cup in his thick hands. ‘They have four shooting ranges. And they are a big city.’ He paused for effect. ‘We have ten.’ He looked pleased.

With just over 300,000 people, Icelanders pride themselves on their world firsts. They tell you they have the world’s oldest mollusc; they eat the world’s healthiest diet; they have the most Nobel Laureates per capita; and the highest per capita consumption of Coca-Cola. This uniqueness was why I had come. Despite the fact that Iceland ranks as one of the highest per capita countries in terms of legal gun ownership, its homicide rate is so low it falls to zero in some years. In 2012, 50,108 people were murdered in Brazil and 14,827 people were killed in the US. One person died violently in Iceland.
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The crime statistics office in Reykjavík sometimes gets a call from the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva. They are told that their figures must be incorrect; nobody has so few murders. Then they tell the bureaucrat that this is Iceland, and nobody has been murdered for quite a while now. So rare an event is murder that when, in 2013, a fifty-nine-year-old man was shot and killed by Icelandic police, the incident was front-page news for days. It even resulted in a national apology from the country’s top policeman. But this is understandable because it was the first time the country’s police force had shot and killed anybody, ever.

Yet despite all of this, there are still guns here in Iceland aplenty. About 1 per cent of the Icelandic population belongs to a gun club, and an estimated 90,000 guns exist in this fire-licked land of a third of a million people.
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I had come to the edges of the Arctic Circle precisely because of this. I wanted to understand how so many guns and so little gun crime could co-exist.

So I asked Guðmann if anybody had been accidentally killed in sports shooting, and he said nobody had been hurt in the gun club since 1867, its foundation. He said an insurance agent had once reviewed his books to calculate the premium a gun club should be paying. But the man had found nothing under the column for gun claims. For amateur dancing things were different.

‘Oh, there were pages and pages of accidents for ballet and salsa clubs,’ Guðmann said, his eyes twinkling. ‘It seems that here in Iceland we are probably better at shooting than we are at dancing.’

Many of the other shooters were indoors; even on a July day like this the weather had sent them inside for thick vegetable soup and layers of butter-lined bread. I walked back up into the modest prefab clubhouse. There a poster showed the classifications of guns: Riffilgreinar cal .22; Skambyssa; Fribyssa .22. The words lingered on your tongue. But what caught my eye was the untended gun rack with four shotguns propped up in it.

I thought of El Salvador, and how guns could never be left like this. Here in Iceland the front door of the club was wide open. There were no guards. But they didn’t need tight security here. Everyone knew everyone – Iceland ranks 169 out of 193 countries in the world in population size; a killer has, basically, nowhere to hide. The names on the competitor board paid testimony to this. Jöhannsdóttir, Valdimarsson, Helgason – all Icelandic. It once was the case that, if you emigrated here, you had to adopt an Icelandic name, as laid down by the National Name Council, it was that homogeneous.

I ambled back into the bleached day and down to the range to watch Guðmann. He walked to the centre of the concrete semi-circle and paused, focus visible in his tense back. He called out, and a shot sounded, and the spinning orange clay target exploded in the bloodless air.

Names are a big thing in Iceland.

In the phone book all people are listed alphabetically by their first names. Children address adults by their first names, and adults certainly address everyone else by their first names – even when talking to the president or, as everyone knows him, Ólafur. The phone book then lists the person’s last name, their profession and, finally, their home address.

The professional listings, though, are different. They do not have to be backed up with hard evidence that you do what you claim to do. So Iceland has six winners, nine sorcerers, eighteen cowboys, fourteen ghostbusters and two hen-whisperers. In this way, if you pick up a phone book and look in between Jón Heidar Óskarsson and Jón Pálsson, you’ll find that Iceland has two Jón Pálmasons. And the one that I wanted to speak to was Jón Pálmason,
skotveiðimaður
, because, while this Jón Pálmason was an electrician by trade, he had a different title here. Here he was ‘a man who hunts animals with a gun’.

I had been told that this Jón Pálmason was the best person to speak to if I really wanted an answer to a question that I had. He was happy to talk, and so we met on Bankastræti – the main bar street in Reykjavík – and headed for a coffee. Jón was a handsome man, with silver hair and the complexion of someone who lived in a place with the best diet in the world.

I got straight to the point.

‘On the one hand there is Central America,’ I said, ‘a place where guns are often in the hands of small groups of men who are not afraid to use them. Then you have Iceland, with a tiny homicide rate and yet with one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. And my question is – how come?’

He started off explaining that Iceland’s low level of violence was partly down to regulation: all automatic and semi-automatic rifles, and most handguns, were banned. Then he explained that acquiring a gun is not an easy process: you need a medical examination, have
to attend a gun handling course and then you need to pass a suitability test at the police station.

‘But you don’t need to have a gun under your pillow here, to protect yourself,’ he explained. ‘We only need guns here for three reasons. First to hunt, second for sport and third for the very few here who collect guns. No one has them for self-defence. We have no army, no war, and there are so few people here that I think it leads to a sense of peace.’

There was, he said, a tradition in Iceland of pre-empting crime issues before they arise, or stopping issues before they can get worse. Right now, police were cracking down on Hell’s Angels gangs, while members of the Icelandic parliament, the Althingi, were considering laws to increase police powers in the investigation of their country’s small biker networks.

It seemed that dialogue formed the basis of order here. A few hundred metres from where we were sitting there was a monument. They called it ‘the black cone’ – a split rock that served as a tribute to civil disobedience.

‘When the government violates the rights of the people then insurrection is, for the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties,’ a plaque beside it read, quoting the eighteenth-century philosopher Gilbert du Motier, better known as the revolutionary Marquis de Lafayette. This was not far from the American fear of a despotic government taking control. But the US response was to buy guns in anticipation of Armageddon. Here in Iceland they insisted on democratic process and tolerance.

Much of this was food for thought. But I still wanted to get to the root of how such a tolerance and measured response could have evolved. So, after meeting Jón, I drove out of the capital and into Iceland’s riverine world of igneous rock and streaming rain.

The man behind the desk at the car-hire company had joked it had only rained twice this year in Iceland. ‘The first for twenty-five days, and now for seventy-five days.’ I laughed then, but the torrent was now so bad that my windscreen momentarily flooded, and I felt like I was drowning. On either side stretched an
undulating world of soaked moss and ancient tholeiite boulders, and my car sluiced through along the road-river.

Forty kilometres out, and, unexpectedly, it rose before me: a hard wall of rock, overlooking a landscape of arterial brooks and eddying rivers. It was the Þingvellir – the ancient Icelandic parliament. Around it dwarf birch trees and moss campion sprouted from craggy rises and purple sandpipers, their backs a spread of diamond rain drops, flew into the whiteness at the sound of my approaching car.

Here, centuries before, the Icelandic government had come to pitch their summer tents at their annual meeting. It was a place steeped in ancient rulings. In the rocks, you’d catch glimpses of cut-deep blackness and wonder what secrets lay in those shadowed ravines. For me, it offered a small insight into why Icelanders seemed able so respectfully to accommodate the gun laws handed down to them by the state. Hard punishment had once ruled those ancient days and blood had flowed here.

‘In Olden times,’ a metal panel read, ‘drowning was widely used as a method of execution. People were drowned in marshes, in fresh water and in the sea. In Iceland, provision was made in law for execution by drowning from 1281.’

Names dotted this rising landscape, loaded with the public threat of what would happen if you crossed the line. In the Stekkjargiá Gorge was the Scaffold Cliff, an islet on the Öxara River formed part of the Execution Block spit. Another place, Brennugjá, held the Stake Gorge, where sorcerers died in the blistering heat of an auto-da-fé. And then there was the Whipping Islet.

These were hard punishments for hard times. Such public displays of state violence left their mark so deeply on the collective consciousness that by the nineteenth century Icelandic justice had less and less need to instil fear – a social contract seemed to have been born. Things become progressively less punitive. By 1928 the death penalty was done away with. And today a life sentence with eligibility for parole after sixteen years is the most extreme punishment dispensed.

State punishment, something so brutal it once marked its name on the landscape, became infused with humanism. And this shift has impacted the whole of society. Today Icelandic police officers do
not routinely carry any guns.
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In the first decade of the Icelandic drug courts, about 90 per cent of the cases were settled with just a fine.
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It was as if justice had proven itself here, where it was understood that heavy-handed violence was never going to work things out – by either state or people – where executing someone was never going to stop murders; and where state-sanctioned use of guns inflamed, rather than reduced, their threat.

None of this, of course, explains entirely why Iceland has so many guns but so little gun violence. I’m sure there is something about the hypnotic landscape or the sheer isolation that touches and pacifies people’s lives here. But tolerance, liberal state punishment, the right to public dissent, gun control – they must all play a part in a world where civilians can own guns without bloodshed and sorrow.