Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (58 page)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to give heartfelt thanks to my agent, Antony Topping at Greene and Heaton, and to my editor at Canongate, Katy Follain; both friends, both inspirational, both on the side of good. I am sorry for the endless morning walks and for filling your heads with dark tales of guns before your breakfasts had even been digested.

Deep thanks must go to Jenna Corderoy, my indefatigable and irreplaceable researcher on this book. A journalist with a glittering career ahead of her and a glittering mind in her head.

I’d like to thank Steve Smith and all of those at Action on Armed Violence for your help, too, in the writing of this book. Without your support none of this would have been possible.

Without the following people, this book would also not have been written. Either through your decisions as editors to send me to far flung parts of the world, your abilities as reporters to help me see the light amidst the pathways of shadows, your courage to speak out in the face of the gun’s terror or just for granting me your time, insight and patience, I thank you equally and deeply:

Aage Borchgrevink, Ailsa Bathgate, Alexander Renderos, Alice Shortland, Alicia Fernández, Anne Cadwallader, Apostolos Spanos, Barbara Eldredge, Cate Buchanan, Christopher Coker, Claudia Xavier-Bonifay, David Mapstone, David Potter, David Watson,
Dorothy Parker, Elaine Potter, Flossie Baker, Frank Gardner, German Andino, Henry Dodd, Jamie Byng, Jamie Mills O’Brien, Jenny Kleeman, Jòn Pálmason, Jaz Lacey-Campbell, Lesley Levene, Mark Murray-Flutter, Michal Lee Sapir, Molly Molloy, Nic Marsh, Oren Rosenfeld, Ramita Navai, Robin Barnwell, Roy Isbister, Sam Poling, Sara Ramalho, Jon Snow, Shahida Tulaganova, Simon Reeve, Sophie Lochet, Stella Hermes, Vicki Rutherford, Will Thorne, Willard Foxton.

Those whose help I fail to mention here, the failing is all mine, but thank you to those who know.

I’d like also to thank all of those people I have not met whose work is referenced in the footnotes and pages herein. I have stood upon your shoulders. To acknowledge each and every one of you in the main body of the text or individually would take up a book in itself. I hope that I interpreted your findings accurately and that you accept that a footnote is more than that – it is a sign of my deep admiration for your journalism and research.

And then, of course, the deepest and most private gratitude must go to my family: whose patience made this possible, whose belief calmed my nerves, and whose spirits eternally lifted me. You remind me there is always something left to love.

A midnight death in San Pedro Sula, Honduras

After an autopsy, San Pedro Sula

Dark sacks in San Pedro’s morgue

Orlin’s phone of horrors, Honduras

A shot to the gut in Cape Town, South Africa

Utøya – the scene of a mass killing in Norway

Death graffiti, San Salvador

Police on a raid in the Cape Flats, South Africa

Children searched for drugs and guns in South Africa

An instructor at an anti-terrorist training camp in Israel