Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (51 page)

1
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Report of the Investigation Commission: Kauhajoki School Shooting
, 23 September 2008, p. 44.

2
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There is no international, standard definition of ‘mass shooting’. In the US, the FBI’s definition of mass murder is often used as a starting point: a ‘number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders. This is different from serial killing, where there is ‘a temporal separation between the different murders’. The US Congressional Research Service adds more criteria: ‘the gunmen do not pursue criminal profit or kill in the name of terrorist ideologies’. For this reason, it excludes religiously motivated attacks.

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It was something seen in the British media’s response to the Northern Ireland Troubles. In the first rank – getting the most prominent coverage – were British people killed in Britain; in the second, the security forces, whether army or RUC; in the third, civilian victims of republicans; and, in the fourth, garnering very little media coverage, were the victims of loyalists – credit to the
Guardian
’s Roy Greenslade for this observation.

4
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http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2014/september/fbi-releases-study-on-active-shooter-incidents/pdfs/a-study-of-active-shooter-incidents-in-the-u.s.-between-2000-and-2013
; the study, of 160 ‘active shooter incidents’ found 46 per cent were in centres of commerce, 24 per cent in centres of learning.

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Saari was friends with Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a misfit of an eighteen-year-old who had carried out a similar shooting at a school in the Finnish town of Jokela the year before. The pair had played together on an online war game called
Battlefield 2
in which they detonated bombs, shot people and used headsets to communicate. They also sent messages to each other discussing
their plans for a shooting. One of the messages said: ‘Let’s do it together.’ They even bought their guns at the same weapons store, a few hundred yards from the school where Auvinen killed eight people and then himself.

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L. S. De Camp,
The Ancient Engineers
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), p. 91.

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http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1009691903261
; a 2003 study led by Columbia University also found ‘ample evidence’ of the media’s coverage of suicides resulting in more suicides. And a 2011 study in the journal
BMC Public Health
found, unsurprisingly, this effect is especially strong for novel forms of suicide that receive outsize attention in the press.

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http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/u-s-networks-to-limit-use-of-virginia-tech-killer-video-1.662459

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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303309504579181702252120052

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http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/28/world/seoul-is-stunned-by-policemans-slaying-of-56.html

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903554904576464193192352636

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As with so much in the American world of gun control, the numbers of mass shootings are endlessly debated: the Congressional Research Service say there have only been seventy-eight public mass shootings in the US since 1983. They estimate that over the last three decades, mass shootings have claimed 547 lives and caused 476 injured victims;
http://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/MassShootings_CongResServ.pdf

13
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http://www.reddit.com/r/GunsAreCool/wiki/2013massshootings

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Some argue that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s – that mass killings reached their peak in 1929. There were, accordingly, thirty-two mass shootings in the 1980s, forty-two in the 1990s and twenty-six in the first decade of the century. The challenge is setting the criteria.

15
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/deadliest-us-shootings/

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http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac_ssi.shtml

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http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-31-postal-shooting_x.htm

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http://time.com/114128/elliott-rodgers-ucsb-santa-barbara-shooter/

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http://www.nbcnews.com/id/8917466/ns/nbc_nightly_news_with_brian_williams/t/jonesboro-school-shooter-free-after-seven-years/#.UylZ5_TV9gM

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http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43004.pdf
; the website Mother Jones claimed the average age of a mass shooter is thirty-five.

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http://forensis.org/PDF/published/2001_OffenderandOffe.pdf
; It’s also interesting that ‘only 6% were judged to have been psychotic at the time of the mass murder’.

22
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http://kildall.apana.org.au/autism/articles/bryant.html

23
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-tech-gunman-warning-signs/

24
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http://www.salon.com/2011/01/12/jared_loughner_mass_murderers_diagnose/

25
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http://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167287373/many-mass-killers-have-had-chronic-depression

26
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http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/

27
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303309504579181702252120052

28
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/assault-weapons-high-capacity-magazines-mass-shootings-feinstein

29
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http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/23/opinion/webster-aurora-shooter/

30
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/02/mass_shootings_2009-13_-_jan_29_12pm1.pdf
; almost all weapons in mass shootings are legally purchased – as Mother Jones concluded: ‘of the 143 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters were obtained legally’.

31
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Breivik had saved €2,000 to spend on a ‘high-class’ prostitute before his planned massacre.

32
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http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/utoya-ptsd-professor-lars-weisth-anders-breivik-341

33
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A licence is required to own a gun, and the owner must give a statement as to why they want one. Many categories of guns, including automatics and some handguns, are banned from sale altogether.

34
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A ban on semi-automatic rifles was introduced in September 2011, but it was lifted at the end of February 2013.

35
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http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201311/fake-hitman-murder-for-hire

36
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/21/alleged-silk-road-ross-ulbricht-creator-now-accused-of-six-murder-for-hires-denied-bail/

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/02/silk-roads-mastermind-allegedly-paid-80000-for-a-hitman-the-hitman-was-a-cop/

38
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The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was not the original plan. John Wilkes Booth and a group of co-conspirators were meant to kidnap the president and hold him hostage in exchange for prisoners. But the plan quickly changed to assassinating Lincoln, as well as the vice president and secretary of state.

39
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As he was shot in the neck, this seems unlikely:
http://qi.com/infocloud/the-first-world-war

40
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http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/feb/17/woody-harrelson-my-father-contract-killer-rampart

41
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http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/30/us/murder-trial-defendant-says-us-is-hiding-facts.html
; he also claimed to have been involved in the assassination
of John F. Kennedy:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/feb/17/woody-harrelson-my-father-contract-killer-rampart

42
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http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/01/world/americas/mexico-young-assassin/

43
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4801971.stm

44
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/04/indian-police-capture-alleged-contract-killer

45
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http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/hired-gun-killer-of-100-people-shot-dead-in-ghaziabad-307025

46
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He thought he was going to get £2,000:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/24/britains-youngest-hitman-jailed-life

47
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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hojo.12063/abstract;jsessionid=271A531DBBB369D8C925ED565173A509.f02t03
;
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/25/hitmen-for-hire-secrets-contract-killers

1
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http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2010/en/Small-Arms-Survey-2010-Chapter-04-EN.pdf

2
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The striking thing, though, when I began my research into gangs, was how little journalists and writers had focused on the guns wielded by criminals. Their rituals, clothing or nicknames were the things that turned gangland lives into the stuff of black legend. But the gangs’ guns seemed often just a sideline fact.

3
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It is young men, those aged between fifteen and twenty-nine, who are not only the most likely to be in gangs, but who are also killed by guns. They account for half of all global firearm homicide victims, with up to 100,000 deaths every year.
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2006/en/Small-Arms-Survey-2006-Chapter-12-EN.pdf

4
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http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/latin-america-worlds-most-violent-region-un

5
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4695848

6
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United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011
Global Study on Homicide: Trends, Context, Data
(Vienna: UNODC, 2011), pp. 93, 114.

7
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http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/is-el-salvador-negotiating-with-street-gangs

8
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Given how many murders are often ‘hidden’ in this part of the world, I have taken the upper limits quoted in the press here. Other reports have said the homicide rate dropped from fourteen murders a day to about five:
http://www.wola.org/commentary/one_year_into_the_gang_truce_in_el_salvador
This number has been repeated, including by the BBC:
http://www.bbc. co.uk/news/world-latin-america-18517208
But this report does put the pre-truce figures as ‘11 to 17 murders per day in 2011’
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/11591

9
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https://aoav.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the_devils_trade_lr.pdf
; firearms are very visible in El Salvador. Every gas station, shopping mall or even hole-in-the-wall store seems to have security guards armed with revolvers and 12-gauge shotguns. With some 85,000 nationwide, security guards form the largest armed force in the country, almost three times the police and the army combined. And they hold the bulk of the estimated 450,000 guns legally owned.

10
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https://aoav.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the_devils_trade_lr.pdf
; 2011 weapons confiscation data from the Ministry of Justice shows that, of a total of 4,097 firearms confiscated in the first eleven months of that year, 78 per cent, or 3,208 weapons, were either revolvers or semi-automatic pistols. Shotguns (433) and rifles (235) were much less common. Finally, explicitly military weapons such as grenades (58), carbines (27) and light machine-guns (29) were confiscated in extremely small numbers, which presumably reflects their relative rarity along with their greater material and financial value.

11
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http://www.cpdsindia.org/smallarmsresearchfiles1.htm
; the Salvadoran government claims it destroyed some 28,036 weapons between 2006 and 2008, but this is very hard to corroborate. The military’s transparency about its holdings of weapons is sharply lacking.

12
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http://www.ourworldindata.org/data/violence-rights/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths
; an Oxfam study on violence in PNG’s Highlands reported that in 80 per cent of traumatic injuries a weapon had been used. Oxfam Position Paper: ‘Armed Violence and the Links to Human Security in Papua New Guinea’,
http://www.oxfam.org.nz/report/oxfam-position-paper-armed-violence-and-the-links-to-human-security-in-papua-new-guinea

13
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Raymond C. Kelly,
Warless Societies and the Origin of War
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 21.

14
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Simon Harrison,
Violence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 88.

15
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P. Alpers, ‘Papua New Guinea: Small Numbers, Big Fuss, Real Results’, in A. Karp (ed.),
The Politics of Destroying Surplus Small Arms
(London: Routledge, 2009), p. 155.