Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (42 page)

But it was not just corruption that fuelled this monumental cock-up. The US, perhaps so loyal to the concept that the right to bear arms was the only way to govern, had given the Afghans far more weapons than they needed. They handed over 83,184 AK47s, even though, at the same time, they were asking the Afghan military to shift to NATO weapons like the M16. In total, over 110,000 weapons were given that were deemed ‘surplus to requirement’.
³⁹

Of course, the US was then to deny any responsibility following this irresponsible largesse. ‘It is the Afghan government’s responsibility . . . to determine if they have weapons in excess of their needs,’ Defense officials said in their report.
⁴⁰
But the report also acknowledged the very real possibility that US guns could end up in the hands of the Taliban. Certainly ammunition magazines ‘identical to those given to Afghan government forces by the US military’ had been found on dead Taliban fighters.
⁴¹

It was not just Afghanistan where this happened. In Iraq the Pentagon lost track of about 190,000 rifles and pistols they had given to Iraqi security forces.
⁴²
As the Small Arms Survey concluded:
‘Weapons were shipped via private arms brokers into a context where the human rights situation had been steadily deteriorating and where the likelihood of diversion was high due to poor oversight and generally weak stockpile security.’
⁴³

The reality, of course, is that some of these weapons, the sale of which had lined the pockets of US gun manufacturers, now line the arsenals of Islamic terror groups.
⁴⁴
Firearms found being used by Islamic militants include American M16A4 assault rifles made by FN Manufacturing and Colt Defense, and XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifles made by Bushmaster Firearms International.
⁴⁵

It’s clear the US’s love for the gun has much deeper consequences that take it beyond a merely domestic issue about its citizens’ rights to bear arms. In Iraq and Afghanistan this love moulded an ethos on how to rebuild a nation – as if through a sheer weight of weaponry you could stamp out dissent, quash radical opinion and sow the seeds of democracy.

I could not help but draw parallels between the US government’s firearm-heavy response to crime, with their SWAT-team police culture, and their firearm-heavy response to nation building. The Second Amendment had shifted from a domestic issue into an international strategy. And, as I found out on a trip to Mexico just after I had attended Las Vegas’s Shot Show, the Second Amendment was also to have even deeper consequences there.

‘NO MORE WEAPONS’ read the tall metal-lettered sign that stood over the Bridge of the Americas. The road beside it led two ways. One took you deep into the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, the other lifted you over the Rio Brava and away into the US city of El Paso. The message was not for the Mexicans heading north, it was for the Americans whose guns were trafficked here, deep down Mexico way.

The line of cars was heavy, as there was no toll here, unlike on other bridges, and it caused the cars waiting to cross passport control
into the US to trail far back into the haze. Mexican men in blackened smocks cleaned car windows in silence. The Franklin mountains stretched into the American distance, framing a listless Stars and Stripes flag that was pushed by a stubborn desert wind from the south. To the side, two chanate birds, the
Quiscalus mexicanus
, sparkled in velvet blue and attacked each other viciously.

The sign’s off-silver letters were made from crushed firearms seized by the Mexican authorities. When the billboard was unveiled in February 2012, the then Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, asked the ‘dear people of the United States’ to help end the ‘terrible violence’ in Mexico. There had been 120,000 homicides in Mexico between 2007 and 2012, and most had been with guns.
⁴⁶
And many of these had been US guns.

‘The best way to do this,’ Calderón said, his voice lifting in the wind, ‘is to stop the flow of automatic weapons.’
⁴⁷

You can see why he made the plea. Mexico has virtually no firearms manufacturing industry, they have very restrictive gun laws, and there is just one gun shop in the entire country.
⁴⁸
Yet the numbers of US guns that end up in Mexico is breathtaking – about 253,000 are estimated to be smuggled in annually.
⁴⁹
It’s not hard to see where they come from. On the other side of the 1,951-mile border lie 6,700 licensed US gun shops.
⁵⁰
And there’s good money in this, too – one study found that 47 per cent of US firearms shops were dependent to some degree on Mexican demand.
⁵¹

The outcome of this was summed up by a US Senate report that concluded about 70 per cent of guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels came from the US.
⁵²
The point was reinforced by some cartel leaders boasting that they buy all their guns from there.
⁵³
Clearly firearms have increasingly become the drug lords’ weapon of choice. In the 1990s guns were reportedly used in 20 per cent of all Mexican homicides; today they are implicated in over half of all murders there.
⁵⁴
North of the US border, too, way up in Canada, the same applies: 50 per cent of the guns used in crime there were smuggled into the country.
⁵⁵

In Mexico, there is certainly enough evidence to prove cause and effect between North American gun sales and Mexican gun violence.
When an American federal ban on semi-automatic weapons expired in 2004, Mexican gun deaths increased by 35 per cent in the Mexican counties adjacent to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas – all of which had lifted the ban. But the homicide rate stayed about the same in the Mexican counties south of California, where a state ban on semi-automatic weapons had remained in place.
⁵⁶

During the US federal assault weapons ban the number of arms crossing south every year was about 88,000; after the ending of the ban this amount had increased by 187 per cent. It has been estimated the lifting of firearm sale restrictions north of the border resulted in at least 2,684 additional homicides in Mexico.
⁵⁷

It’s not just Mexico where American’s lax gun laws have had an impact. The US government found that 76 per cent of firearms they traced in Costa Rica in 2013 were either manufactured in or imported into the US. It was 61 per cent in Belize.
⁵⁸
And in Jamaica, American guns are said to be dropping into Kingston like mangoes off a tree.
⁵⁹

I looked the length of the spreading line of worn-down cars filing patiently into the US. The other road, the one coming down from the north, was empty – the officials here just waved the cars through into Mexico. The lack of checks on southbound traffic, combined with constant demand for firearms from drug cartels, must have created a perfect storm for smugglers. It begged the question: how did these guns get into smugglers’ hands in the first place?

Court records give us a glimpse of one of the ways it works. In 2008, the American Range & Gun shop in Pembroke Park, Florida, made a hefty sale to a shadowy buyer. A few days before, the purchaser had told the dealer, Victor Needleman, that he didn’t think he could pass a gun background check. The would-be buyer said he had been ‘in some trouble’ when he was younger. No problem, said Needleman, just buy it in another person’s name – an illegal process called a ‘straw purchase’.

The buyer, in fact, had never been in that kind of trouble – rather he was an informant working with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). He made it clear to Needleman that he wanted to send the guns to Central America.
⁶⁰
Needleman said that wasn’t a problem either – he had already sold
guns into Guatemala. He was not bragging: several of his sales were later traced to shootouts between gangs in which a number of people were killed. Needleman even boasted about a customer who had bought twenty-five AK47s at a time.
⁶¹

Soon afterwards, the informant returned with a ‘friend’ and put down the $2,120 deposit for fourteen semi-automatic pistols. His friend illegally filled out the paperwork. When they returned to pick up the guns, they ordered twenty more Glocks. Then Needleman was arrested. It was an open-and-shut case. Needleman was arrested and sent down for nearly six years.
⁶²

Legitimate gun dealers doing crooked deals like this, though, are just a small part of the problem. The issue is much more widespread. In 2012 an investigation found hundreds of civilian gun owners selling tens of thousands of firearms every year on the internet without any background checks.
⁶³
Private sellers, meanwhile, make ‘occasional sales’ or sell from a ‘personal collection’ in gun shows all the time. The distinction might seem subjective, but the effect is quite significant. In the US federally licensed dealers are required to perform checks at gun shows, private sellers are not. And those concerned about this have estimated that as many as 40 per cent of gun transactions are conducted without such checks.
⁶⁴
A US government report concluded that gun shows were the second-leading source of guns trafficked into the illegal market.
⁶⁵

Certainly there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that these loopholes should be of concern to the US public. There was Ali Boumelhem, a member of Hezbollah, who was imprisoned for trying to smuggle US guns back to Lebanon. He had been buying weapons at gun shows in Michigan.
⁶⁶
Or Conor Claxton of the IRA, who had gone to South Florida gun shows to buy guns to smuggle back into Northern Ireland.
⁶⁷
Even an Al Qaeda spokesman has remarked on the gun show loophole, encouraging American jihadists to ‘go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?’
⁶⁸

The concern of Americans on the Mexican border, though, was
not about what was going south. Rather they were upset at what was heading north. I had spent some time with the Minutemen Project in south-eastern Arizona – a group of activists set up in 2005 with a mission to monitor the flow of illegal immigrants across the border. One of them had invited me on a flight low across the border, and as we skimmed across the arid shrub, you could almost feel their paranoia. These men, with names like Chuck and Jim, saw the wave of ‘wetbacks’ – economic migrants from Mexico and beyond – as genuine threats to their safety and liberty. But the occasional ragged figures of illegal migrants that we saw from the air just looked pitiful and furtive, not armed and dangerous.

The Minutemen, and others like them, had intractable and hardline views. In one video posted on YouTube, someone called Commander Chris Davis told militia members ‘to go armed’. ‘It is time that we start taking back our national sovereignty . . . How? You see an illegal. You point your gun right dead at him, right between the eyes, and say, “Get back across the border or you will be shot.”’
⁶⁹

None of them saw the irony in all of this: that being killed by a US firearm south of the border was far more likely than being shot by an idiot with a rifle north of it. None made the connection that what the Latinos were fleeing from – with over 52,000 unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children seeking to cross this border between October 2013 and June 2014 alone – was the very gun violence that US guns had helped facilitate.
⁷⁰
As Alec MacGillis wrote in the
New Republic
: ‘The surge of migrants coming to the US from Central America is being fueled in part by the movement of guns heading in the other direction, from US dealerships doing brisk business with the help of porous guns laws and a powerful gun lobby.’
⁷¹

And it was to this new group – the gun lobby – that I wanted to turn next. These were men who oiled the cogs of commerce for small arms, who spoke both for (and sometimes against) the gun’s place in the world.

14. THE LOBBYISTS

Strange animals in Maputo, Mozambique meeting an anti-gun campaigner and ex-child soldier – sickness in New York as the Arms Trade Treaty comes into force – an American lobbyist and a power breakfast – the National Rifle Association’s rhetoric examined – how the pro-gun lobby hijacked the horror of Sandy Hook, Massachusetts – meeting zombies in Orange County, New York State – an insight into the American gun psyche at the London School of Economics

It was 25 June 2014 and a national holiday. The streets of Maputo, Mozambique’s seaside capital, for the most part lay empty. The solid
fin-de-siècle
buildings were silent behind their elaborate wooden doors, save for the occasional sound of plates being put down for an early lunch. Men played checkers outside one of the humidity-streaked homes, their game caught in the shade of spreading trees.