by Iain Overton
At the time ovens in England used coal gas; something that contained carbon monoxide in a lethal dose. In the late 1950s, so easy was it to stick your head in the oven in England nearly half of all suicides were gas deaths, some 2,500 a year. Seeing the problem, the government acted, and soon gas companies stopped using poisonous coal gas. What was known as the ‘execution chamber in everyone’s kitchen’ was removed.
What did the suicidal do instead? It seems most carried on living. England’s suicide rate dropped precipitously by one-third and then stayed at that level.15 Many of those who gassed themselves apparently did so impulsively. As Scott Anderson wrote in a New York Times article: ‘In a moment of deep despair or rage or sadness, they turned to what was easy and quick and deadly.’ Removing the oven slowed the process down; an accessible exit from the agony of despair became suddenly less so.16
If this is true for gas ovens, then why not for guns? Studies have shown that just keeping a gun unloaded and storing its ammunition in a different room significantly reduces the odds of that gun being used in a suicide; it seems that there was some correlation between access and lethal action. So I contacted one of America’s leading experts on suicide – Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University – to find out more. We spoke over a crackling line, but what he said was clear.
‘There is probably no psychiatrist who couldn’t tell you they know patients who have thought about ending their lives,’ he said, his voice dipping in and out on the call, ‘who then, with the treatment for depression or alcoholism or whatever, went on to live thirty or forty years without a recurrence of that kind of suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation is often situation-specific and often transient.’
He talked about the people who throw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco – one of the world’s most popular sites for suicides. The bridge stands 75 metres above the cold water of the Frisco bay. After a fall of four seconds, jumpers hit the surging surface at 75 miles an hour, a speed that usually breaks their backs. Over 95 per cent of the jumpers die from the drop alone, the rest from drowning or hypothermia. The chances of dying are about as sure as using a gun, so the bridge attracts those who see a flying death being better than a blood-splattered one, with a peak of ten suicides there in one month alone.
‘Years ago, back in the late ’70s, a professor at Berkley collected information regarding over 500 people who attempted to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge but were restrained,’ Paul went on. ‘He found the vast majority, almost 90 per cent of them, were still alive twenty-five years later, and only about 5 per cent had subsequently committed suicide, 5 per cent dying of natural causes. OK, the rate of suicide was higher than the general population, but 90 per cent of them were still alive an average of a quarter of a century later.’
His words made me think about Paris. Was it inevitable he was going to kill himself? If he had not been able to get a gun, would he have wandered down to the dark, slick spread of the Hudson River and drowned himself instead? Or would he have waited for the next lift to the top floor and thrown himself into the yielding air and felt, for a brief second, like he was flying?
These were questions that I had sought an answer to, not in the US, but back when I was in Switzerland visiting the Small Arms Survey. That was because there I had found other data worth exploring. Not about the numbers of guns, but about the numbers of suicides by them.
After leaving the Small Arms Survey, I had walked back out into Geneva and followed the tramlines south, passing the quiet classical façades that line its neat streets and from there crossed the slow-pushing waters of the Rhône onto the Boulevard Georges-Favon. The sky was a peppered grey, and genteel apartments rose on each side. I carried on until I reached a place where the air was filled with the chaos of crossing cable-car wires and the roads filled with bookshops and Chinese tea merchants.
A sun-frayed shop window caught my eye; a Dungeons and Dragons store. Fantasy and comics do well here, because the Swiss seemingly enjoy such subtle distractions along with chocolates and fancy timepieces. There, in the window, a yellowing box stood: ‘Descente: Voyage dans les ténèbres’. It was a game that led you down into the shadow-lands and beyond. It seemed apt.
Around the corner, opposite a café selling bitter coffees and neatly stacked pastries, was my destination: Stop Suicide. It was a charity set up to help young people at risk. Sophie Lochet, a conscientious woman in her mid twenties, met me at the door wearing a white shirt, blue jeans and a pair of glasses that framed a kind face. She beckoned me into a room filled with reports and posters, campaign leaflets and books with depressing titles. I settled down amid offers of coffee and chocolate.
‘In Switzerland, every day, about four people will take their lives,’ she said. Over a thousand a year. ‘That’s three times more than die in road accidents.’ She explained the role that guns play in this.
Switzerland has one of the highest number of guns per household in the world. This small landlocked state, high on the west-central plains of Europe, has almost 3.5 million firearms in a population of just 8 million, leaving almost 40 per cent of Swiss households with one.17 This, she said, had led to guns being one of the leading ways of suicide among young men caught between the volatile ages of fifteen and twenty-nine.18
One reason for this, Sophie explained, was that – until recently – Swiss conscripted soldiers were allowed to keep their rifles with them after they had completed their military duties. About 40 per cent of gun suicides here were at the end of an army-issued weapon. In 2003, though, the number of Swiss soldiers was halved as a result of a sweeping army reform. This sudden decline in the armed forces meant there was a parallel decrease in the availability of guns nationwide.
This was why I had come to see Sophie. I wanted to understand if this drop in guns had resulted in fewer suicides, to see if those who say, ‘There is no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates,’ were right.19 I wanted to challenge what the pro-gun lobbyists would argue: that ‘denying one particular means to people who are motivated to commit suicide . . . simply pushes them to some other means’.20
Sophie had the answer. ‘One study did look at the gun suicide numbers before and after that reform. The academics found there was a major reduction, both in the overall suicide rate and also in the firearm suicide rate.’ The evidence, she said, was compelling. Echoing what Paul Appelbaum had told me, only 22 per cent of the reduction in firearm suicides was substituted by other ways of killing oneself. Like the coal gas situation in the UK, a drop in access to guns in Switzerland was not followed by a rise in other forms of suicide. Rather, it led to an enduring drop in the general suicide rate. Today in Switzerland there are about 200 gun suicides per year. Two decades ago it was about 400.21
Switzerland is not the only place this sort of cause and effect has been seen. I later read that in 2006 the Israeli Defence Force witnessed a disturbing number of suicides in its ranks. In an effort to bring down this number, the IDF banned soldiers from taking rifles home on the weekends. Suicides fell by 40 per cent. An army review concluded: ‘decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents’.22
In Australia, too, a series of strict gun control laws in the mid 1990s led to a decrease in gun suicides, but with no significant rise in other types of suicides.23 These findings are in line with a host of studies that have found, again and again, that stricter gun laws are associated with lower gun suicide rates.24
Yet, in the US, where about 20,000 people die every year from suicide by guns, the political classes seem inured to such observations, and pro-gun advocates deny any correlation between access to guns and suicides. The lobbyists, most notably the National Rifle Association, conclude fatalistically that gun owners ‘exhibit a willingness to take definitive action when they believe it to be in their own self-interest. Such action may include ending their own life when the time is deemed appropriate.’25 They do not take into account th
e influence of mental illness on gun suicide.
But Sophie was convinced. Guns cause suicides. Of course, other sorrows play their part. Suicides are driven by depression, loneliness and broken hearts, but guns help transform a moment of crisis into a final act.
And yet firearm suicides somehow are still seen as inevitable and unstoppable. Or they are called something else entirely – an accident, a gun discharge. I had read that in some countries, gun suicides are under-reported by as much as 100 per cent.26 It was like that with Ernest Hemingway, a man long beset by depression. He had ‘accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun this morning’, according to his wife.27 But we know what really happened. We know even without the New York Times pointing out that Hemingway was ‘an expert on firearms’, or that his father had taken his own life with a Civil War pistol.
Such reluctance to admit that suicide occurs, to address the things that contribute to it, such as gun availability, stems, it seemed to me, from the idea that taking your own life goes against nature and God, a view long held in Anglo-Saxon society.
‘Self-murder’ became a crime in England in the mid thirteenth century, while the term ‘to commit suicide’ reflected the Catholic Church’s view of the act as sinful. Suicide victims were once denied a Christian burial, dragged to a crossroads under the cloak of night and there thrown in a pit, a wooden stake hammered through their hearts. There were no clergy, choir or prayers. The family was even stripped of their belongings, which were given to the Crown. In this way, the suicide of an adult male once could have reduced his survivors to poverty.28
Even today, in some parts of the world, suicide is still illegal. In India, you could, until 2014, have faced up to one-year imprisonment for trying to shoot yourself. You can still be sent to prison for attempting to kill yourself in Ghana, Singapore and Uganda. Internationally, we still have a social disgust for suicide as well as an institutional refusal to respond to it. No wonder it is rarely talked about when it comes to gun control.
I thought of this as I watched the video of Paris Lane’s death once again. Half a million people might watch his death, but nothing changes. No campaign is launched, and sympathy remains muted. Such is the power of the gun and the silent powerlessness of those in despair. The gun not only transforms these people’s decision in taking their lives, but it also transforms our response to their deaths.
The comments below Paris’s video revealed this: ‘That man was weak and let his infatuation for a woman overpower his rationale,’ wrote one.
‘The hell is waiting you idiot,’ added another.
Some were just ugly: ‘If all blacks did the same America will be a safe place to live.’
But then I saw a comment that surprised me.
Someone had written: ‘They didn’t break up u fools . . . He had problems with some bad guys and they hunted him. He went home to his mom and gf to say goodbye then killed himself so they wont kill his family and friends . . .’
In reading this, my view of Paris Lane’s suicide changed. Perhaps his death was more a response to power than to pain, I thought. And in so thinking, the gun took me down a path that led away from those impacted by guns, towards those who wield them.
III. Power
5. THE KILLERS
The world of mass shooters and assassins – Finland recalled – a bloody day in a teaching college – the American mass shooter examined – Norway – travelling into the wilds – the scene of the worst mass shooting in history – an Oslo drink with a killer’s expert – a meeting with Julian Assange in London – the ugly offerings of the dark web
There are many types of people who kill other people with guns.
There are those who do so for the explicit control of power. They are, by and large, criminals, gang members, terrorists, policemen or military personnel. When they pull a trigger and a life is ended, people in one of these groups do so out of obedience to a specific ideology or dogma. It could be a desire to control the streets, an urge to rob, to protect their nation, to maintain order, even to exact retribution. Of course, when they take a life they all become killers. But their actions are generally not driven by a desire to kill for killing’s sake. Death is a by-product of something else – usually power and control.
There are the untold numbers of killers who are gun owners who use their weapons for acts of personal power. Those caught in a moment of passion, despair, anger or self-defence, who use their guns to take a life. Sometimes their actions are justified, often not. These deaths are usually not premeditated; rather they are a specific response to threats, passions or fears. And the motivations behind this use of the gun are so diverse that to understand what makes such people kill is as complex as understanding life itself.
Then there are those two groups who seek a darker form of power – for whom death is the thing they seek. Killing not as a by-product of protection, or defence, or desire, but death as a means to its own powerful end. These are the mass shooters: all too often young men who go on the rampage and kill in a single, public event. They defy the normal motives for violence – robbery, envy, personal grievance. They ignore basic ideas of justice.
Or the assassins. That rare breed of cruel men who are paid to kill, and for whom money cannot be the only reason they do this job, because you can always earn a living doing something else.
Mass shooters and assassins: two groups I felt had to be the first things to write about when I shifted my gaze away from those whose lives were lived and ended at the end of a gun and entered the world of those holding the gun in their hands.
The snow was beginning to fall on that September day in 2008 when I walked through a muffled forest that surrounded a small town in western Finland. I had travelled out to the creeping edge of Kauhajoki and there, caught within an endless line of trees, was trying to find a rifle range. A place where a now-dead man had been filmed a few days before, shooting at targets, and where his poisonous words foretold a horror.
I had left the road ten minutes earlier and cut into the claustrophobic woods and was now lost. The sound of my feet breaking the frozen ground cut the quiet. Thoughts about the Finnish wolf and bear, out there beyond the corridors of trees, distracted me. And then, ahead, between the pines, I saw the outline of a wooden shooting range.
The cracking of the leaves startled the man. I first noticed him as he began to turn; his coat blended well with the leafy surrounds. Then I saw the rifle loosely cradled in his arm. This was not the time, nor the place, to meet a stranger with a gun.
A few days before, a young Finnish man, a twenty-two-year-old called Matti Juhani Saari, had done the unthinkable. He had walked into his college and killed ten people. Saari had gone on the rampage about 5 miles from here, at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality. He had crept into the university buildings through the basement and, armed with a Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol, wearing a balaclava and dressed in military black fatigues, had gone upstairs. He acted as if he was on a combat mission, but he was the only enemy in this quiet Finnish town.
At 10.30 that morning Saari had walked into an exam room, filled with his fellow students taking a business studies paper, and opened fire. He approached his victims one by one, shooting each at close range. He then stepped into the corridor, loaded a new clip and returned to kill his teacher. He slowly moved around the classroom, delivering a vicious coup de grâce to whoever made a sound.
After he had killed, Saari called a friend to boast about what he was doing. He then poured petrol onto the crimson-stained floor, dropped a match and walked outside, the fire rising behind him. As the flames rose, nine classmates and one teacher lay dead and eleven more injured in the cruel flickering. Saari watched the rest of the students running, screaming, out into the thin light of a Finnish autumn, then he shot himself in the head.
With a total of eleven people now dead, it was the deadliest peacetime attack in Finnish history. Saari had fired 157 shots, sixty-two of which later were found in the bodies of his victims.1 Twent
y rounds were in one person alone.
One bullet, the least lamented, was the round he used on himself.
With that final shot his pistol also sounded the start of a different race, a race for journalists to get to the scene, to report on the terror created by that most modern of things: the mass shooter.2
I happened to be in Oslo at the time and, because news desks in London do not think: ‘It would take him seventeen hours to drive there, and it’s 700 miles away,’ but rather: ‘Norway is close to Finland, so let’s send him,’ they called me.
‘Get packing. We’re going to send you to Finland.’
And that was it. I was with Jenny Kleeman, an up-and-coming journalist, and we were reporting for ITN on Norway’s immense oil wealth. We were analysing Oslo’s sovereign investment funds when we got the call, and death was the last thing on our minds. But a day later we had flown (not driven) to Kauhajoki, a place forever marked by what had unfolded there and one that left its mark on me – because it was my first encounter with the grotesque realities of mass shootings.
We hit the ground running. My editor back in London was hungry for facts about why Saari had done what he had done, and we quickly learned that the troubled killer, in the weeks leading up to the incident, had posted several videos online under the username ‘Wumpscut86’. His terrible message: ‘You will die next.’ The videos showed him firing his Walther P22 at a local range.