Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (36 page)

We walked into a mildly hallucinatory section of the Vegas Strip – a kitsch reincarnation of Venice, without the soul or the sewage. Passing concrete pink colonnaded bridges and barbershop-painted poles, Jake moved on ahead through a set of double doors. I followed. A casino lay between us and the convention centre, and the floor was lined with intensely coloured carpets, disruptive patterns designed to stimulate your eyes and keep you in a permanent state of wakefulness. Each minute you remained conscious was a minute more where a dollar could be stripped from you. There were no windows; the only stars Vegas wanted you to see were the Botoxed ones on stage.

The shrill sound of slot machines whirred in the close air. Some of the show’s visitors peeled off to try their luck.
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Even more joined the stream, and, like a shoal of salmon, the crowd surged and spilled down a staircase to the entrance.

There were 67,000 visitors here. In the first Shot Show in 1979, 5,600 people had turned up. But these vast, flowing lines consisted
only of those who made a living out of guns. Casual visitors were not allowed at this trade show. The tumult spoke of an industry of a quarter of a million jobs, worth some $6 billion.
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There are more gun shops in the US than petrol stations. At almost 130,000, there are about ten times the number of federally licensed firearms dealers in the US than McDonald’s.
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And the dealers are overwhelmingly middle-aged, white and male; just looking at the legions here told you that. There wasn’t a black face in the whole crowd.
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I picked up a lanyard from an unsmiling man in a booth and entered the show. As far as the eye could see, there were adverts and banners, logos and pavilions all devoted to guns: 13 miles of aisles filled with everything from small, family-run operations through to international firearm consortiums. Here were gun producers whose names conjured up cowboys and freedom fighters, despots and liberators: Colt and Kalashnikov, Smith & Wesson, Heckler & Koch.

The show, prorated into huge halls, was divided like the steps of my journey – hunters and sportsmen, police and military. A biker pushed past me, swastikas tattooed onto his layered, fleshy neck. I wondered if there was a section for criminals. I took a hard right down the main drag, into the section for law enforcement.

The organisers had included this category twelve years earlier. Then it covered 7,000 square feet; today it was twenty-four times that. Dummies covered in SWAT team gear stood on all sides; enormous banners displayed helmeted men with angry eyes. On each side were logos and marketing creeds: ‘Illumination tools that serve and protect,’ read one for a torchlight company; ‘For those who train with a higher purpose,’ read another, and it felt like a muscular prayer.

I walked towards a booth selling SWAT equipment. ‘Leave achievement and destruction in the path behind you,’ declared its banner. A mountain of a man, a gun trader from Oregon, was there, trying on a bulletproof vest. His sides were exposed like slabs of butcher’s meat. He said that ever since Obama had spoken about looking at the issue of gun violence following the massacre at Sandy Hook, a sort of fever had gripped this country. Rumour had taken hold that the government was coming after your pistols and your rifles.

‘There was a frenzy of people coming through my doors. Obama
was the best gun salesman in the US,’ he said. ‘I brokered deals for $500 guns that then sold for $2,000.’

An obese woman walked into me, forcing me back with her width. Her red T-shirt read ‘I carry a gun ’cause a cop is too heavy’. The fat on her back caused the letters to bulge. I turned back, but the gun trader was already in another conversation. Business was brisk; cards and order forms passed between eager hands under company names like BlackHawk! and Warrior Systems.

I walked over to the Colt pavilion: a monument to American gun culture. Men formed a silent echelon around a slew of black matt guns. These were the ever-popular, ever-contentious, auto-loading, assault-style weapons – military rifles designed for civilian use. They had scientific names like the LE901-16S and AR15A4, and these men lifted them with focused skill. They knew they could stock their shops with guns like these.

So did the producers. In its 2011 annual report, Smith & Wesson said it saw a $489 million domestic, non-military market for these ‘modern sporting rifles’. From 2007 to 2011, according to the Freedom Group – the world’s largest gun conglomerate – US civilian rifle sales grew at 3 per cent a year, while those of assault weapons grew at a rate of 27 per cent.
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It was no surprise, then, to learn that eleven of the top fifteen gun makers manufactured them.

The industry repeatedly says these semi-automatic weapons are for hunting and for target practice, but death – and the fear of death – stalks much of the civilian assault-weapon advertising. ‘Survival means different things to different people,’ said one of Colt’s older ads. ‘Take the shot of your lifetime!’ the company urged.
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Other companies did the same. ‘Flat Out. Lights Out’ was the tagline for one assault rifle. Another advert – brushed with crimson – was for a scope called ‘Revenge’.
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Throughout the show death was a perpetual and unique selling point: killing here was marketed and promoted. A company called Gem-Tech produced silencers and said they were ‘62 Grains of quiet diplomacy’. One of their adverts had the catch-line: ‘Our only trace is a body where the enemy once stood’. Another company showed the image of a sniper’s rifle poking through a willowy grass verge.
‘Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man,’ read its copy.

Alone, these images could be dismissed, but seeing row after row of them, I began to feel insanity creeping in. Profit here was infused with murderous intent. One company was selling sweatshirts with ‘One Shot, One Kill’ above a grinning skull. Others based their marketing on a quasi-Christian Templar iconography, like that of a crusader’s skull next to the motto ‘In Hoc Signo Vinces’ (‘In this sign we conquer’). The Holy Cross had been turned into a sniper’s reticle. Another advert showed a shadowy figure, antlers sprouting from his forehead, a cup dripping with blood in his left hand – the stuff of Aleister Crowley. But the skulls these marketeers used were always bleached and intact. They were not the bullet-cracked skulls I had seen in San Pedro Sula, with their green and mottled flesh.

John Hollister, with his black T-shirt, shaved head and white goatee, looked the part in this alternative world. But he was not here buying. He worked for Advanced Armament Corporation based out of Georgia and sold silencers. ‘We are a lifestyle,’ he said, pointing to the logo of a skull above a pair of crossed AR15s fitted with silencers. ‘We once had a deal where, if you got that image tattooed on you, you’d get $1,000 credit from us. Two hundred and fifty people got tattoos in that first week.’

This was supposed to be a counter-culture, and yet even that had been appropriated, like so much here, by the logic of corporate capitalism. John said his office email signature read: ‘A lifetime member of American Gun Culture’. And it was not just John who had this corporatised passion.

It was a profit-driven gun culture that was also at the heart of what Ed Strange, the manager of a company called Wicked Groups, did. Ed, like John, had a long goatee and wore lots of black. His arms were a patchwork of tattoos. He marketed his Michigan company as the ‘Bad Boys’ of gun grips. They customised the handles of pistols for people who wanted a mark of their individualism on their sidearm. But despite all the choice of customized art, he mainly sold two images – the US flag or the skull. His biggest customers were US soldiers spending their hazard pay or law enforcement
officers pursuing private passions. And they were almost always white men. ‘In this industry, I can’t think of a single company that is African American,’ he said.

This marketing of skulls, though, bothered me. It seemed as if death was abstract and saccharine. A bloody fashion accessory. And where there is death, there is always sex. ‘Make Love Loudly, Make War Silently,’ said the logo for a silencer manufacturer. The sexual marketing here was unreconstructed. Images of women in low-slung dresses holding cigarettes lined some of the booths. The scantily clad Hotshot Girls were out there in the mêlée, signing calendars. A Czech gun company had dressed up its pistol-toting models in bikinis and feathered wings and called them Guardian Angels. And the gun manufacturer Glock had once taken this a step further and given its regional sales reps an assignment: go to a local strip club in Atlanta and pick out the best-looking girl there, they said. She can promote our new pistol at the show. And they did and she did.
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I went over to their pavilion – filled with men taking steady aim with Glock’s ever-popular pistol range – and asked for an interview. I wanted to ask them about this marketing tactic, as well as plenty of other things, but they just said they’d have to get back to me.

Patriotism was also present in swathes. The advertising dragged you back to the idea of liberty again and again. Freedom Munitions bore the tagline: ‘Freedom starts here’. Satellite phone networks sold ‘Freedom Plans’; $1,499 gun safes were called the ‘Freedom Model’. The Stars and Stripes was appropriated in ways that demeaned not elevated it. Old Glory was used to sell everything from sniper optics to ‘Kill ’em, Grill ’em’ ammunition.

There was more than a whiff of Islamophobia as well. I had seen three target companies selling life-sized shooting mannequins dressed in keffiyehs and bishts. Mission First Tactical’s stand had a poster on its glass partition of an American soldier in a desert, his head bowed. Behind him stood a woman in a burka. They were surrounded by phrases like ‘I am a warrior’ and ‘I will always place the mission first’.

Of course, there were lots of outfits not bedecked with skulls and crosses, Mom-and-Pop concerns that had a much more considered
approach to gun sales. But it was not moderation I was looking for. America’s gun violence was immoderate, so my eye was drawn to its cultural peripheries, where I found a marketed obsession with death, faith and the flag.

But beneath the muscular Christian nationalism was a hard corporate reality, one without patriotic sentiment. No matter how much you wrapped the US flag around guns, you could not ignore the fact that three of the five top firms at this show were not American.
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This dichotomy was summed up by one image that repeatedly caught my eye. Framed photographs dotted around commemorated Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK47. He had died a year before, and one photograph had a huge floral wreath of blood-red roses around it, placed upon a stand of two AK rifles. ‘One of the greatest and most influential firearms designers of our time,’ it read. It gave pause for thought. Here, in the heart of America, stood lavish memorials to a gun designer whose work had taken so many American lives, yet no one was protesting that fact. Six decades ago this would have got you dragged in front of the McCarthy hearings. Now it seemed the main person disturbed by the AK47’s legacy had been Kalashnikov himself. He had, before his death, written to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church regretting his involvement in the twentieth century’s greatest killing machine.
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But here, it was business as usual.

It was intriguing. Was the allure of the gun so strong that the icon of communism and anti-America materialism – the AK47 – could be so easily embraced? To answer this question, I set up a meeting with Thomas McCrossin. He was the general director of the Russian Weapon Company and had just signed a deal with the company Kalashnikov Concern for the distribution rights of their rifles to the US. It gave McCrossin the chance to sell 200,000 Kalashnikovs every year from sea to shining sea, and I wanted to ask him about the image problem there might be in doing that.
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He greeted me with a suspicious look. A sombre middle-aged man in a cinereous suit, he extended his hand and gave me that terrible handshake men sometimes do. The one when they force their hand to be the dominant one, above yours. I let him do it because it was
a weak psychological trick, and it said more about him than me, and we sat down in a grey cubicle office that stood beside his company’s rifle-lined stand.

Looking back at our meeting now, I still find it hard to decipher what he told me. The conversation was filled with leaden words such as ‘private investors’, ‘consolidation’ and ‘exclusive distribution’. I asked how many sales he hoped to make. ‘Leave that be,’ he said with a push of his jaw. Instead, he talked about market levels returning to normalcy, artificial growth and ‘sportarised’ versions of rifles. Perhaps it was the windowless office, the blandness of his voice or my jet lag, but it was like skating on a clouded ice-rink in an ashen light. Imprecise, vague and elusive corporate-speak. The bloody realities of what these rifles had done, and could do, were reduced to a drab sales pitch. He then said he had another meeting and gave me his dominant handshake again, and I walked away, wiping my hand as if removing a stain.

Almost immediately, I stumbled across a far more modest stall. In many ways, it was the very thing I had been looking for – here was someone who might be able to tell me, without a PR officer getting in the way, about a world that was still hidden. One of exports and deals, shipments and arms trading – how guns get around the globe.

Unlike the other outfits at the show, this one was spartan: just a desk and a banner that read ‘Hurricane Butterfly’. It was a small company run by a Chinese-American called Jason Wong. Trim, with a precisely ironed blue shirt and military-cut hair, Jason could have been an insurance dealer or an auditor. Instead he dealt in guns. His operation helped internationally trade firearms for those unwilling or unable to do it themselves.

‘I get export licensing. I consolidate products. Then we ship,’ he said, leaning back in the way men do when they are comfortable with what they do. ‘I’ve sold about $5 million worth of guns. My industry is recession-proof – we sell to the entire world. This is a growth industry – it’s not going away.’