Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (49 page)

It was also not just Lanza. The DC snipers who haunted Washington’s beltway did so with a Bushmaster, using it for eleven of the fourteen shootings,
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while William Spengler, the killer who shot four and killed two volunteer firefighters responding to a fire in Webster, New York, in 2012, was also said to have used one.
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But there was another concerning thing: Cerberus owns a health-care company. It is called Steward Health and has 17,000 employees serving over 1 million patients in New England,
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which means that, with almost 46,000 cases of violent crime in New England in 2011,
Cerberus almost certainly runs a business that has to treat gunshot victims.
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Think on it. The biggest firearms company in the world, one that makes immense profits selling guns, some of which are used in mass shootings, is also a company that seeks to profit from treating the victims of gunshot wounds.
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These ugly truths caused such an uproar that, in December 2012, in response to the Sandy Hook massacre, the company announced it would begin selling its investment in the Freedom Group.
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Perhaps it was Stephen Feinberg’s father, who actually lives in Newtown, who urged his son to get rid of the companies.
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Perhaps it was the pressure from investors such as the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (which had invested $600 million in the Cerberus funds) that sparked the announcement.
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Or perhaps it was just PR talk. Cerberus never did what they said they were going to do. A year after Sandy Hook the company that made the guns that killed those kids declared its profits. They had made about $240 million – a 35 per cent rise in Freedom Group’s earnings on the year before those children died.
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I had looked for the words ‘Sandy Hook’ in the Freedom Group’s annual report. Nothing. Instead it had phrases like ‘amortize actuarial gains and losses’ and ‘supplemental financial metric for evaluation of our operating performance’. No Sandy Hook. But there was mention of $3.4 million of state and federal tax credits. US taxpayers, it seems, subsidise the manufacturers of US guns.
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Above me then, inaccessible, were their clean and well-lit offices. In there sat Cerberus’s CEO, Stephen A. Feinberg.
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A fifty-four-year-old father of three, he reportedly keeps an elk’s head on his wall and rides a Harley. He calls himself ‘blue collar’ yet brings home as much as $50 million a year, has an apartment on the Upper East Side and went to Princeton.
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But I was not surprised that Feinberg would think of himself as just an ordinary working guy. His company’s words are similarly oblique. ‘We are investors, not statesmen or policymakers,’ their statements read.
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Yet money in the US is always a gateway to politics and policy, and Feinberg certainly has a key to the hearts of the
Republicans. He has donated over a third of a million US dollars to them in the last ten years. And, for a man who does not see himself as a policymaker, he’s pretty selective which politicians he gives his wealth to: men like Utah Senator Orrin Hatch,
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a man with an A+ rating by the NRA for ‘opposing any international treaty by the United Nations . . . that would impose restrictions on American gun owners’,
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or Montana’s Max Baucus, one of four Democrats who voted against the amendment to extend background checks to private gun sales – and whose vote helped kill the bill.
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So of course he’s an investor, not a policymaker. Just as his wife donating to the National Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees and a host of other NRA A+ rated politicians is also in line with Cerberus’s humble position that he’s just an apolitical investor.

Perhaps Feinberg’s most direct link to the pro-gun Republican caucus, though, is the one-time vice president of the United States. J. Danforth Quayle is chairman of Cerberus Global Investments.
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Then there is George Kollitides – chairman and CEO of the Freedom Group.
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Unlike Feinberg, whose online presence amounts to a fleeting picture of a mousy-haired man with a small moustache, Kollitides’ online profile reveals a life of self-regarding pleasure. At forty-three, he has the trim appearance of a military man, hair shorn hard at the sides, a face showing more pride than humour. Photos catch him posing with the antlers of downed stags
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or crouching behind a freshly killed bear.
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Other snaps show him at New York charity events.
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Mixing with the moneyed east coast elites he seems to aspire to the diary pages of New York high society.

His wife, Karen Kollitides, seems aspirational, too. Blonde, groomed in a specific way, she is captured in the glare of high-society events such as ‘Models 4 Water’, a charity that provides clean water to remote parts of Africa.
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It makes you wonder whether the guns her husband produces have been involved in displacing refugees in Africa and causing untold families to eke out dry-mouthed lives in endless scorched deserts.
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Certainly his company’s guns have been found in the hands of militants murdering for the Islamic State.
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Like Feinberg, George Kollitides is also a major donor to politics and lobby groups. In December 2013, the NRA inducted him, along
with the Freedom’s Group vice chairman and president, into the ‘Golden Ring of Freedom’, a group of individuals who have given the NRA at least $1 million.
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He has also recently made political donations to plenty of the Association’s top-rated Republicans.
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If you want me to believe these men give their money freely, without agenda, to the US political elites – that they are just humble investors – then I guess I might as well believe that guns have nothing to do with killing people as well. Just as I might as well believe that Wayne LaPierre’s comments about media manipulation and undue political influence does not also happen at the NRA.

Not surprisingly, then, neither Feinberg nor Kollitides nor LaPierre would speak to me. So I left those pristine, well-lit, comfortable offices and wandered outside.

Cerberus. It was called after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. Feinberg apparently liked the idea that one of the dog’s heads was always on watch, just as his firm would guard its clients’ investments around the clock.
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For me, the name had different overtones. After all, part of me felt that I had been to parts of Hell. I’d heard the cruel silence of Sandy Hook. I had seen the horrors that American guns had wrought in Honduras and Mexico. I may have even been shot at by one of Cerberus’s weapons.

Now, an age since setting off on this journey, I had come up against Cerberus – the dog that guarded the entry into Hell – and it wasn’t letting me any further.

16. THE FREE

Freedom and a world without guns considered

The Statue of Liberty rose above me, a chlorine-green giant, a silent presence. People walked around its base, glancing up at it, but it dominated that small island so much that people focused on little things. Mainly on each other, for here was the world: teenagers flirted, children ran and called into the drifting wind. From east to west, north to south, it was, as it had been for so many years, a meeting place of nations.

I had come here after the stonewalling of Cerberus. If the dog at the gates of Hell wasn’t going to talk to me about the inner workings of the Freedom Group, then a ferry ride to the most famous symbol of freedom in the world seemed an appropriate response.

So there I stood, gazing at the swooping gulls, and felt the Atlantic wind pick up. The New York skyline twinkled on the horizon. I looked up at the statue. They had called her ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’; she was the ‘Copper and Iron Colossus’ whose carapace was as thin as two American pennies. Their choice of metal – copper, not bronze – was deliberate. The French designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, did not want a statue ‘cast from cannon captured from the enemy’. The European military tradition had been to create their victory statues from the bronze guns of the defeated, but copper was the metal of coin and commerce. She was a symbol of liberty from the repression of the gun.

Across the dancing waters lay the endless spread of America, and I thought how much things had changed. Today Lady Liberty still stood for freedom – but it was a different form of liberty than that which Bartholdi had perceived. Now it was wrapped up in the logic of the American Second Amendment’s right to bear arms: a right conceived in an age of simple single-shot guns, not ones that could decimate a school playground in the blink of an eye. Any questioning of this right came up against a barrage of opposition – a stone wall of lobbyists, manufacturers’ political donations and silent moneyed men.

It was a logic of the right to bear arms that had spread far from America. US guns ended up fuelling drug wars in Central America and Mexico, and vicious conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. Second-Amendment-quoting lobbyists had hobbled international attempts to address the spread of illicit guns worldwide. And the logic of American mass production meant that far more guns were being made than were ever being destroyed.

I had come to the end of my journey. Behind me lay a battered landscape of memory – the worlds of pain, power, pleasure and profit. What I had seen was that the gun’s impact on lives – our lives – was divided into dozens of different realities. That communities living with guns at their epicentres often lay far removed from other communities with other guns. Gun lobbyists never got shot at, while gang members rarely got to meet politicians. Gun makers focused on the minutiae of a barrel’s width, while doctors frantically focused on stemming the blood from the imprecise holes caused by a bullet’s spin.

This divided world was the root of the gun’s hold over us. We could never get rid of its ability to impart pain, because doing so meant taking away someone else’s power, their pleasure and profit. Those who say guns don’t kill people, that people kill people, just haven’t seen the whole picture. They have only seen one element of its transformative power. Yet I had seen all of the varied faces of the gun, and to me it was unequivocal – guns kill.

Transformative: this was the essence of what guns were. They took man’s basic impulses and stretched them, from the pinnacles of
empowered wealth and desire to the depths of pain and war. They could turn an argument into a deadly confrontation. Make you give all your attention to a man you wouldn’t, shouldn’t give a second thought for. Save you and sink you. Of course the gun gives us freedom, I thought. Freedom to do as we want – or for someone else to do as they want to us.

That was the horror.

From the tomb-like arsenals of Brazilian armouries to the sun-touched mountain heights in South Africa, I had seen guns transform situations, people, ideologies and even me. It had left me on edge, spread thin. I felt fearful – death had left its secret mark; wars don’t end just because you are not there. And I feared the future. I anticipated the criticism this book might bring – angry words from those wedded to their right to own a gun.

But I had seen what I had seen, been marked by it, and it felt as if words were the only thing I had left. And yet that fear somehow left me, for a moment, here. I looked up at the looming Statue of Liberty and down at the worn grass that surrounded her. On one patch some central European teenagers were sunbathing. A man sat on another, slowly unwrapping a silver-foiled sandwich. Here was peace.

A thought struck me: despite the inalienable right to own a gun in the US, you cannot go to this emblem of America armed. Liberty Island is a federal property, and National Park rulings ban all weapons. Tourists join long, slow queues on the New York shore and are herded through airport security scanners to make sure no guns are brought here. This has created an island that has virtually no crime. The United States Park Police were unequivocal: ‘We located no statistics of any firearms incident on the Statue of Liberty National Monument from 2000 to the present.’ This, despite about 20 million visitors travelling there over that time.

It was possibly the safest public space in the world.

I looked around at this artificial vision of freedom and breathed out slowly. What the world might be if we had no guns at all, I thought. And then the sun flared, and the light grew and filled the sky.

What the world might be.

NOTES

Chapter 1: The Gun