Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (45 page)

The NRA is certainly not a poor organisation. Nearly half of the NRA’s funding comes from the dues paid by its 5 million members.
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But its big cheques come from the gun industry. Campaigners claim that, since 2005, ‘corporate partners’ have donated as much as $60 million to the NRA.
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Included in this figure are eight gun companies who have ‘given gifts of cash totaling $1,000,000 or more’.
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And you are struck by facts such as the NRA gives each gun industry CEO their very own golden jacket if they hand over a million bucks.
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It is a virtuous circle – or a vicious one, depending on how you look at it – where profits from purchased guns are used to fund lobbying that help secure your rights to purchase more guns.

And a good deal of lobbying goes on: in 2013 the NRA spent $3.4 million on that dark art.
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The question is, of course, who is pulling the strings here – the manufacturers or the lobbyists? I asked Josh Horowitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence about this, and his response was direct: ‘People always say, “Oh, the industry controls the NRA . . . they give them a lot of money.” They do give them a lot of money, but it’s almost like extortion money: “You will give us this money”, or “You will not innovate for safety . . . to put better trigger locks on. Because if you do, we’re going to boycott you.”’

He had a point. During the Clinton administration, Smith & Wesson committed to help prevent gun sales into the illegal market.
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That decision almost put the company out of business.
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The NRA instigated a boycott, and Smith & Wesson ended up losing 40 per cent of its sales.
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Putting it simply, the NRA has the US gun industry by the balls.

No other gun lobby in the world has this sort of influence. When Nigel Farage of the British UK Independence Party called for handguns to be legalised and licensed in the UK he was met with derision.
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When Germany introduced a firearm registry, the gun lobby response was muted. ‘The German minister of interior promised to guarantee a very high level of security of the data, so for us it’s not a problem,’ said Frank Goepper of Forum Waffenrecht, one of the main gun rights groups there.
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By and large gun lobbyists elsewhere are niche groups. In the US, the NRA is not only the main voice for gun owners, but it has a deep and pervasive influence on America’s gun culture. This influence was touched on by LaPierre in his speech.

He had two messages that caught my attention. First, he criticised the media for deceiving the American public. Then, he said that US laws were being used to the advantage of political elites.

On the issue of left-leaning hacks he grew invigorated. You knew the media was lying, he shouted, because they still call themselves journalists. It was an intriguing finger to point. After all, the NRA are masters of the art of inflammatory disinformation. They talk about the ‘spillover’ of border violence and homicidal immigrants – without acknowledging the harm that US guns cause south of the border. They see the perceived threat of terrorism as underpinning the need for American citizens to bear arms,
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even though in 2013 only sixteen US citizens were killed worldwide from terrorism.
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The same year there were 32,351 firearm deaths in the US.
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Having said this: what do you expect? The NRA are lobbyists. Of course they exaggerate, just as liberal lobbyists will portray an opposing view. It’s the nature of the beast. But there was one thing that, when it came to the media, I did find pernicious, and that was the NRA’s stifling of legitimate, independent research.

In the 1990s there were serious attempts by the US government to look at the impact of gun homicides. But the NRA’s position, then as now, was that this was an ‘abuse of taxpayer funds for anti-gun political propaganda under the guise of “research”’.
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The tipping point seemed to come when Art Kellermann, a medical researcher, found that guns kept at home were significantly more likely to be
used to kill a family member than to be used in self-defence.
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The NRA response to this was to crush any dissenting research.

They focused their attention on Centre for Disease Control (CDC) funded gun research.
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Lobbied by the NRA, Representative Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas, pushed through an amendment that said: ‘None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control.’
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The CDC’s funding was slashed by $2.6 million, the same amount they had spent on gun research the year before.
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These effects are long-reaching. A pioneer in the field of injury epidemiology, Dr Garen Wintemute, who had his CDC financing cut in 1996, told the
New York Times
: ‘The National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress have largely succeeded in choking off the development of evidence upon which . . . policy could be based.’
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The NRA have choked other things, too. They were behind a 2003 governmental edict that said the ATF, the body that regulates firearms, could not give out to researchers any data about the tracing of guns involved in crimes. They were also there when the FBI was told they had to destroy records within twenty-four hours after Americans passed a gun background check.
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But it was not just an information war that the NRA was fighting. LaPierre also used the podium to lambast Washington’s abuse of political power. He talked about the law in the US being ‘selectively enforced’, clearly with an eye on Obama’s desire to impose some form of gun control to reduce events such as Sandy Hook. This accusation concerned me.

After all, the NRA has major political clout in its own right. Eight US presidents have been lifetime members.
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All but three of the forty-five American senators who torpedoed gun control measures in Congress in 2013 had been paid by gun lobbyists.
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And, according to the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, the NRA and the firearms industry have pushed over $80 million into political races since 2000.
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The impact of this lobby can often be seen in the absence of, rather than the presence of, politics. The US firearms industry is remarkably unregulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission – a US
government agency that protects consumers from ‘unreasonable risks of injury or death’ – does not have the authority to regulate guns, while the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act means that gun manufacturers are shielded from many product-liability lawsuits. So toy guns may have mountains of regulation to reduce the risk of them causing fatal accidents,
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but real guns have no federal safety standards at all – even though American children are sixteen times more likely to be unintentionally shot and killed than children in other high-income countries. It was a cruel conundrum that was down to the singular power of the firearms lobby.

It goes further. Cigarette manufacturers are not allowed to market directly to children, but gun manufacturers very much are. Keystone Sporting Arms’ Crickett rifle is sold as ‘my first rifle’, using a cartoon cricket as its logo. The NRA offers shooting camps for kids and publishes a magazine called
NRA Family InSights
, with a special section for under-eights. All of this ignores the fact that gun injuries send about twenty American children to hospital every day;
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that in the US guns kill twice as many children and young people as cancer, five times as many as heart disease and fifteen times as many as infection.
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And it was in this painful conjunction of child deaths and political power that I found the NRA’s lobbying influence truly bewildering and painful.

The trees bore the memories of what had happened here. Other towns in this part of Massachusetts wore the pleasures of Hallowe’en happily. Ghouls and goblins were bought in bulk at Walmart, and the cartoon horrors of the American gothic imagination were given full reign. From trees hung grinning skulls or glowing pumpkins.

But not here.

This year the decorations were tamed in Sandy Hook – ribbons replaced skeletons; there were lights instead of dripping blood – because less than a year before, Adam Lanza had killed twenty-six children and teachers at an elementary school just up the road.

Driving into Sandy Hook felt like entering a forbidden territory. I had wanted to go there and walk the streets, browse shops and speak to locals about what had gone on here in the winter days of 2012. But I could not leave the car. I felt like an intruder, and a cheap one at that. Perhaps I had been to too many of these silent streets by now. The memories of Finland and Norway still remained. What had started as journalism had shifted into something darker, and I felt I had no place here.

I passed the school, and there was a sign outside. It was a construction site now, and no unauthorised vehicles were permitted to enter – they had pulled it down. I carried on driving until I had passed the outer reaches of the town. There I parked and walked into a local coffee shop.

The Starbucks of Newtown is, for the most part, unremarkable. A poster of Edward Hopper’s
Night Hawks
hangs on one wall, a brightly coloured collection tin for the ‘Faith Food Pantry’ stands to the side. I walked up to the manager, a bald and smiling man. He quickly realised why I was there and immediately said he was sorry, he couldn’t talk; he would be uncomfortable speaking to me. He echoed my own feelings there and then.

I had come to this particular coffee shop because here, less than a year after the shootings, over two dozen gun rights supporters had converged to voice their appreciation of Starbucks’ policy not to ban firearms in its stores. Some came wearing camouflage and packing pistols. They were to be disappointed. It was shut – a sign read: ‘Out of respect for Newtown and everything our community has been through, we have decided to close our store early today.’

Their actions, though, became national news. Locals were outraged. Elsewhere Starbucks had drawn plenty of criticism from anti-gun groups for allowing people to openly carry guns in its stores in states that allowed it. But for pro-gun owners to come here – here, where the soil still lay freshly turned on graves too small to look at – to make a political point? That was unfathomable.

I struggled at times like these to find any common ground with the pro-gun lobby. And it was not the only thing that gun lobbyists did that was offensive to some. Two groups even scheduled an event
called ‘Guns Save Lives Day’ for 14 December 2013 – the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.
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Another gave away guns to residents in Orlando, Florida, just 20 miles away from where neighbourhood watcher George Zimmerman controversially had shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.

There might be outrage in such actions, but spotlighted shootings in the US follow a depressingly similar pattern. Demands are sounded for action to address the availability of weapons. The debate runs quickly up against a wall of opposition on the right to bear arms. And the pro-gun lobby wins the day.

Elsewhere in the world mass shootings have provoked governments to introduce ways to prevent future mass shootings. After the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, the British government brought in stricter gun controls.
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When fourteen were killed in Aramoana, New Zealand, lifetime gun licences were replaced by ten-year ones. The massacre of sixteen in Erfurt in Germany in 2002 led to the screening of buyers under the age of twenty-five for psychological concerns.
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And in the mid 1990s in Australia, the Port Arthur massacre led the Conservative government to ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons as well as initiate a nationwide gun buyback scheme.
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These laws worked. Firearm homicides in Australia dropped 59 per cent between 1995 and 2006. In the eighteen years before the 1996 laws, there were thirteen gun massacres resulting in 102 deaths. Since the introduction of their laws there have been no massacres.
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In 2008 to 2009, there were thirty-nine fatalities from crimes involving firearms in England and Wales, with a population about one-sixth the size of America’s. In the US, there were about 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2008.

The US, though, is different. It is the only country in the world where, following a mass shooting, the nation has responded with loosening, not tightening, gun laws. After twenty-one people were killed in a mass shooting in Texas in 1991, the state pushed through a law permitting the carrying of concealed weapons. Other states followed.

Even the massacre of Sandy Hook saw a call for more, not fewer
guns. Twenty-seven American states since that fatal day have passed ninety-three laws expanding gun rights, including measures that let people carry concealed weapons in churches.
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Some schools even allowed their teachers to go armed.
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So fearful were many US firearm owners about gun control that they bought up millions of rounds of ammunition. In fact, they bought so much that the global supply was impacted – even Australian ammunition stocks ran short.
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