Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (46 page)

The NRA’s response to the horrors of what had unfolded in the quiet town of Sandy Hook was more guns, not fewer. They backed a ‘school shield’ proposal – improving school safety by calling for armed guards in every school.
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‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,’ LaPierre told reporters.
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One month after the Newtown massacre, the ‘NRA: Practice Range’ app, which tests shooters’ accuracy, came out.
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The app was originally recommended for four years plus.
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The sober reality of all of this is that in the eighteen months before Sandy Hook there were seventeen deaths recorded nationwide in seventeen documented shootings at US schools. In the eighteen months following Sandy Hook, forty-one deaths were recorded in sixty-two incidents: a rise of 141 per cent. There has been a steady rise in the last decade of mass shooting incidents in the US.
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So powerless do many Americans feel about their ability to prevent mass shootings that an Oklahoma company has come up with a solution. They sell bullet-resistant blankets to protect schoolchildren – an 8mm pad that they say protects against 90 per cent of all weapons used in school shootings.
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What the gun lobby’s work amounts to: a nation where schools buy bulletproof blankets for kids.

My attempts to understand the unique relationship with the gun in American culture had led me far across this broad and windswept land. From talking to gun shop owners in Arizona to gun control
lobbyists in Washington, survivalists in Arizona and peaceniks in Manhattan, I had sought to understand a little about why the US is so enamoured of the gun. The roots to this lay deep in the soil here, deeper than I could ever dig.

But the trail had led me to the Orange County Fairgrounds in Middletown in New York State. So it was, on a cutting November morning, I pulled my coat hard around my shoulders and walked the length of a massive warehouse that ran parallel to a long line of pick-up trucks and rusting 4x4s. Fifteen dollars and you were in, free to stroll between the yellow signs that rose from the trestle tables. ‘Guns wanted,’ they said, ‘Buying guns, Parts, Ammo.’

It was a county gun fair – just one of thousands held around the US every year, and a family atmosphere hung around it. Fathers ate hotdogs with their sons, grandfathers talked to granddaughters about shooting bears. In one corner a woman with a bullet earring and a camouflage T-shirt was eating, without looking, from a packet of Doritos. A poster behind her read: ‘I’d rather be judged by 12 men, than carried by 6’.

Yet, despite the home-loving feel of this place, there was something else that was troubling here. It wasn’t the incongruity of the Chinese sellers, with their neatly laid-out tables of laser-sights. It wasn’t the M16-shaped BBQ lighters, or the knife called ‘The Redneck Toothpick’. These things did not disturb. Rather, it was the table with the spoon on it.

More specifically, it was the table with a spoon with AH engraved on it. Adolf Hitler’s spoon, found in 1945 by a US Airborne lieutenant called D. C. Watts, and now yours for $400.
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The spoon was nestled beside a row of other Nazi objects: a greeting card from Hitler – ‘Der Führer des Großdeutschen Reichs’; Eva Braun’s calling card.

I looked up and saw another image. This one slightly different; it had hollow eyes and a pockmarked face with drooling lips. A $4.99 Nazi zombie target. I write this because the image stayed with me. Then, as now, it struck me that the Nazi zombie was somehow significant in my journey into the world of the gun. That it was, in a way, the perfect lobbyist in this world – indestructible evil
personified. It was, at least, the perfect reason to own a gun – combating the zombie apocalypse.

I had seen them throughout gun shows in America: zombie targets, T-shirts and costumes. There was the Zombie Max bullet.
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There were zombie survival camps.
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Outdoor Life
magazine even ran a ‘Zombie Guns’ feature – ‘the only way to take ’em out is with a head shot’.
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Dwelling on this zombie metaphor might seem extreme, but in the US zombie culture is massively popular. The second-season premiere of AMC’s
The Walking Dead
, a series about surviving in the face of an apocalyptic world, was by far one of the most popular programmes in the US; Season 4’s premiere night later attracted over 16 million viewers.
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The immensely popular
Call of Duty
has a zombie mode. Nazi zombies have starring roles in films such as
Zombie Lake
,
Dead Snow
and
Zombies of War
.
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And zombie walks, where people dress in the clothes and make-up of the undead, have been seen in twenty countries, with up to 4,000 participants at a time.
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This zeitgeist has even had political impact. When in Florida a state senator in 2014 proposed a bill allowing people to arm themselves in a state of emergency, it was rejected by another senator, who dismissed the gun-toting bill as ‘An Act Relating to the Zombie Apocalypse’.
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The zombie metaphor has been taken up by the pro-gun lobby, too. In October 2013, hundreds of armed pro-gun rights men rallied at the Alamo in San Antonio. There, Alex Jones, a controversial radio talk show host, took to the podium, an assault rifle across his back. He outlined a worldwide conspiracy to take away everyone’s guns, calling those who advocated basic background checks ‘pathetic zombies . . . stupid victims that want us to live like they do, slaves’.

Why this obsession with the undead, I wondered? I was concerned that my thoughts on this would incur ridicule, that the gun nuts would tear me apart, so I sought higher help.

It came in the form of an academic called Christopher Coker. A professor at the London School of Economics, Christopher had written articles about zombies and combat and was happy to meet.
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His room was a Wunderkammer of delights, filled with Chinese
Maoist propaganda puppets, Russian dolls with the heads of the Taliban painted on them and West African voodoo dolls. He had taught there for thirty-two years and looked impossibly young for a man of fifty-six. Perhaps luckily for me, he also agreed with my zombie observation. There was something to it, he said.

‘West Point cadets read zombie books now; it’s penetrated the American military to a remarkable degree.’ Outside his door hung a news cutting. The US Defense Department had a disaster preparation document called CONOP 8888. It was a zombie military response document – developed to train commanders preparing for a global catastrophe. The briefing stated, clearly, ‘this plan was not actually designed as a joke’.
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I asked Coker what it was about zombies that proved so attractive in the world of US guns.

‘First of all, you’re not dealing with creatures with any moral personalities,’ he said. ‘You can shoot as many as you like. It’s just open fire, and there’s no moral conundrum. This has to be seen through the perspective of the War on Terror. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Taliban and Al Qaeda were actually zombies?’

But he put its attraction as much deeper than just psychotic soldiers and gun-nuts. ‘Paranoia is extremely important in the gun culture and the NRA . . . America’s just paranoid about enemies within. It’s always the enemy within. It starts with the Brits, with Benedict Arnold. Whom can you trust? Compare that to zombies – your neighbours can turn into zombies through contagion. That’s why you need a gun – to defend your family against your neighbours, essentially.’

Its roots were deep. ‘That paranoia comes from Calvinism. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Catholic or an atheist, Calvinism deeply permeates the American imagination. There are demons here on earth – they’re not waiting in hell. Americans live continually with the idea of fear, and that I think is a very primal fear. It’s very much a part of the American psyche. It could be zombies, it could be another AIDS virus. It could be terrorists, of course.’

It reminded me of the 1991 film
Cape Fear
, by Martin Scorsese, when the private investigator Claude Kersek says: ‘The South was
born in fear. Fear of the Indian, fear of the slave, fear of the damn Union. The South has a fine tradition of savoring fear.’

But it is an odd fear. After all, the general crime rate in the US is on a downward path – 40 per cent lower than in 1980.
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Knowing this, I could only conclude that these concerns, summed up by zombified danger, were sustained by the ever-present threats that permeate America’s news and advertising.

You could see this fear in so much of the gun companies’ marketing, too. Glock put out a commercial that focused on the role a gun plays in stopping a stranger knocking on your door and raping you.
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The hysteria of the new millennium was used to sell guns, with marketing men highlighting the fear that Y2K would cause mayhem: ‘dogs through starvation will revert to wild beasts’.
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And, of course, there existed the perennial concern that Obama was coming to take away your guns, as summed up by LaPierre in an article on the NRA website: ‘Obama’s Secret Plan to Destroy the Second Amendment by 2016’.
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How to protect yourself when the zombie apocalypse comes? Huge caches of guns and ammunition, that’s how.

So lucrative is this cultivation of anxiety that the US firearm industry cites it is a key reason to why so many Americans bought guns in 2013. ‘Fear of a potential rise in crime contributed to unprecedented industry growth,’ one report concluded.
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Profits flow from terror. The number of criminal background checks for firearm purchases jumped 22 per cent in the month following the Twin Towers attacks. In 2012, following the massacres of Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, FBI background checks rose some 82 per cent.
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It was a deep-rooted terror that compelled scared home-owners to keep a pistol under their pillow at night.

The horrible irony is that such an armed response does not actually make you safer. As the
New England Journal of Medicine
concluded: ‘Americans have purchased millions of guns, predominantly handguns, believing that having a gun at home makes them safer. In fact, handgun purchasers substantially increase their risk of a violent death. This increase begins the moment the gun is acquired – suicide is the leading cause of death among handgun owners in
the first year after purchase – and lasts for years . . . Gun ownership and gun violence [rates] rise and fall together . . . Permissive policies regarding carrying guns have not reduced crime rates, and permissive states generally have higher rates of gun-related deaths than others do.’
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Despite this, it remains in the interest of gun companies and the NRA to market the lie that you need a gun to save your life. Manufacturers are faced with the basic truth that, unlike fridges or vacuum cleaners, they sell something that is pretty indestructible. They cannot urge their customers to replace old weapons – the ruggedness of their guns is one of their key selling points. So their advertising has to focus on two other things: the accoutrements that you can buy, like sights and bespoke grips, or the protection a gun offers you from the things you fear.

Adam Smith once said words to the effect that no nation can be happy if the greater part of its citizenry lives in poverty. Perhaps you can add to that: no nation can be happy if they live in poverty or fear, or both. What I had seen on my travels was that the one thing that truly, consistently transformed poverty and fear into deadly violence was the availability of guns. And this easy availability of guns was largely down to two groups: the lobbyists who secured the political will for their sale and, of course, the people who made them. The manufacturers.

15. THE MANUFACTURERS

Guns as the first product in history – revelations on manufactured death – the workings of a pistol factory on the Black Sea coast in Turkey – massive gun profits and political influence in New York, USA – gaining access to the hell-dog boardrooms of the world’s largest gun manufacturer foiled

November 1851 was, by any stretch of the imagination, a remarkable month. It saw the publication of
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville; a book seen by some, with its monumental ambition, as the first modern novel.
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It was the month that celebrated the laying-down of the first protected submarine telegraph cable, on the bed of the English Channel, foretelling an era of global communications.
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And, on a London day when the sky at dawn had been the colour of the Thames but was now brilliant and blue, it saw Samuel Colt standing before the bewhiskered and besuited members of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, waiting for them to fall quiet. He had something to show them.
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Like many American engineers, Colt had travelled to an England entranced by the displays of the Great Exhibition, and it was there that he planned to show off his design.
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What he presented fascinated the crowd: an invention with interchangeable parts.
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It was the Navy Colt Revolver. What captured the greater imaginations of these straight-backed and high-browed engineers, though, was that 80 per cent of the gun had been made on machines: a revolutionary departure from crafted metal gun parts traditionally lathed by hand.
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