Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun

by Iain Overton

  Then he said journalists come here and all they want to talk about is what happened on that day, and not what had happened to the community. So I began to ask him questions about his life, but I floundered. What had happened here made me feel almost shy. I was hesitant to talk about the horrors that had unfolded. So I asked if house prices had been hit, and we talked a little about this, as it was something we both understood.

  Then, as if he felt obliged to, he spoke about Breivik.

  ‘He is a stupid man. They should not call him by his name. They should call him as the mass killer, and that is that.’ The easiest thing would have been if someone had just put a bullet in the head of that mass killer, he said.

  The rain had begun to fall harder now, and the lake sparkled with the drops. There was not much more to talk about, or those things that could be said felt wrong to say. So we shook hands, and I left him, the permanent view of the island framing his land, and I wondered what it must be like to wake every day being reminded of what happened here.

  Further along the lakeshore I parked at a small strip of rock that projected out towards the island. Here the government intended to set up a permanent memorial, a sharp cut-through grey stone to symbolise the unnatural tragedy that had engulfed this place. I sat and, through my misting windscreen, watched as the white clouds slid down from the mountains and shrouded Utøya.

  I had been to a few places around the world which had been marked by guns, just as Breivik’s guns had done here. School massacres in Britain and America, mass graves in Somalia and the Philippines, genocide sites in Armenia and Germany. That same awkward quietude, that feeling that any question you ask is tinged and mawkish, an absence of any easy explanation for what happened – these things were always a feature. So it was here. And the space between the earth and the heavens grew slowly smaller as the clouds came in, and the rain lessened until silence was the only thing left.

  Night had returned to Oslo’s glistening streets as I walked past endless shops selling kitchens and homeware: white candles and wooden floor-boards and Scandi-chic. Norway does not wear its wealth loudly. Things here are not grotesque or baroque. But good taste requires consensus; social order and criticism are there in case you step out of line. If you start doing your house up with pictures of dogs playing pool, if you don’t follow the correct sauna rituals, someone will tut and tell you so.

  But where Norwegians see good taste and a proper way of living, others see intolerance and small-mindedness. Because, beneath the liberal attitudes, a provincial conservatism lurks. Norwegians might be friendly, open-minded, polite even, but you can’t escape the impression that some think they are better than you.

  This, at least, was what a Pakistani taxi driver, who had once been a PhD student in Islamabad, told me in Oslo. He had grown a beard since they had taken his taxi licence photograph – he had rediscovered his Islamic faith in the Fjords. He spoke about the perpetual unsaid: that if you don’t like the rules of Norway, you had better go back from where you came. But it’s hard to say no to living in a place with one of the highest qualities of life in the world.

  I thought about the driver’s words as I walked the neat streets and wondered perhaps where he saw intolerance, if others would see just a strong sense of conviction. You need self-assurance to have good taste and a highly functioning society. But with light always comes dark, and it was this national self-belief that, perhaps, found its most aggressive, most self-deluded form in the mind and actions of Anders Behring Breivik.

  Such reflections occupied me, because I was on my way to meet a Norwegian writer, Aage Borchgrevink. Aage had spent many months investigating Breivik and the motivations that drove him to kill, and I wanted to know if such a murderous gunman as Breivik can operate outside the culture he wants to annihilate.

  Aage was handsome without vanity. Wearing a high-collared grey sweater and a blue T-shirt, he was the sort of person you’d cast as a good guy in a Scandinavian police series. His English was impeccable. But he was, in a way, not a typical Norwegian. He had been a human rights investigator in the Balkans for over twenty years – Chechnya, Belarus, the Caucasus. He was self-critical and had lived long enough outside Norway to see it for its flaws as well as its beauty.

  We met in a bar called Den Gamle Major, the Old Major, a place where Breivik himself was likely to have once drunk. I walked up to the counter and bought a glass of wine for Aage, a beer for me. It cost $30, and I had to ask twice to make sure I had heard the price right. But it was right, because Norway has the second-highest alcohol taxes in the world: the price of social order contained.

  Taking the two glasses back to the table, Aage was quick to get to the matter at hand. We began at the beginning, as you do with such things: with the killer’s relationship with his mother.

  Aage explained that Breivik’s family problems were well documented by mental-health workers. When Breivik was just four, his mother became preoccupied with the fear her son would violently assault someone and frequently told him she wished he would die. Psychiatrists in the 1980s had concluded that the timid boy was a ‘victim of his mother’s projections of paranoid aggressive and sexualized fear of men in general’.

  Despite these terrible reports, Aage said that the response of the state was not to intervene. Their reaction to this abuse was moulded by a strong Norwegian self-conviction about what was right and wrong. In this case, Aage said a belief in biological determinism – that the ideal condition for a child was always to be with their mother – was presumptive at the time. Both the court and the Child Welfare unit disregarded the warnings of experts. Breivik stayed with mother.

  ‘The system,’ Aage said, ‘let him go.’

  Such a failure to intervene meant, Aage thought, that there was a missed chance to stop the young boy evolving into the deeply troubled young man. Under cross-examination, even Breivik said his mother was his ‘Achilles heel’: ‘the only one who can make me emotionally unstable’. The killer told the court he would urge his mother, a solitary woman, to find a hobby. She would tell him, ‘But you’re my hobby.’

  Then there was the sexual nature of their relationship.31 Aage said that social workers put in their reports ‘the mother and Anders sleep in the same bed at night with very close bodily contact’, but nothing was done about this. As an older man, Breivik would sit on top of her on the sofa and attempt to kiss her. He even once bought his mother a dildo.32

  The psychological impact of this childhood clearly distorted Breivik’s view of the world and of himself. ‘He was almost like a zombie,’ Aage said. ‘His manifesto was very consumer-driven but it was lifeless. He defined himself by his brands. He’d go and buy a sushi dinner for a hundred euros or go and buy a thousand-euro outfit. It was a form of hyper-consumerism.’

  The interesting thing, though, was how much the Norwegian legal debate during the killer’s trial appeared to focus on the psychological past of Breivik. There were two forensic psychiatric reports done on him. The first came back with the diagnosis that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia – making him criminally insane. The other was a diagnosis of a compound personality disorder, with an emphasis on narcissism and paranoia – meaning he was criminally sane. The court settled for the second view.

  The media, in turn, fixated on issues like right-wing extremism in Europe, the ability of the internet to help radicalise young men and the failures of the police on that dark day for not pre-empting the attack. But one issue was largely ignored in all of this.

  ‘No, there was not much debate about gun laws,’ Aage said. This surprised me. In the US most massacres stimulate the gun law debate. But here in Norway it was the focus on society and on Breivik’s upbringing that dominated.

  Even by Breivik’s own account, though, guns and military paraphernalia were central to his planning. He had to overcome a problem – in Norway it’s not that easy to get your hands on a gun.33 So he spent six days in Prague in the early autumn of 2010, because he believed the Czech Republ
ic’s gun laws were amongst the most relaxed in Europe and that he would be able to buy what he wanted there: namely, a Glock pistol, hand-grenades and a rocket-propelled grenade.

  Before Breivik left Norway, he even hollowed out the back seat of his Hyundai to clear space for the firearms he intended to buy. But he failed to get any, writing later that Prague was ‘far from an ideal city to buy guns’. His only ‘success’ was having sex twice.

  Returning to Olso, Breivik ended up buying his weapons through legal channels. He said in his manifesto he could do this because he had a ‘clean criminal record, hunting licence, and two guns already for seven years’. In 2010 he got a permit for one more gun: a $2000 .223-calibre Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic carbine; he said he was buying it to shoot deer.

  The next thing he wanted was a pistol, but getting a permit for that proved much more difficult. He had to demonstrate regular attendance at a sport-shooting club and so, from November 2010 to January 2011, Breivik went through fifteen training sessions at the Oslo Pistol Club. And with each lesson, his ugly plan came closer and closer to its bitter end, like a spider patiently waiting for a killing.

  By mid January his application to purchase a Glock pistol was approved. He then bought ten thirty-round magazines for the rifle from a US supplier, and six magazines for the pistol in Norway.

  The rest we know.

  Perhaps because it took Breivik so much time to arm himself, or perhaps because of a wider refusal to believe that firearms had a pivotal role in the massacre, guns did not play a major part in the debates following the killings. There was a brief suspension of Norwegians’ ability to buy semi-automatic rifles, but the hunting lobby there appears to have influenced the policy-makers, and that law was quietly dropped.34 And today Norway still allows semi-automatic guns.

  In a country where reasonable debate seems so lauded, this struck me as odd. Clearly, the numbers that Breivik killed was partly down to his having trapped the students on an island. But the fact he could shoot and shoot again without having to pause to cock his rifle must have given the children he was shooting less time to run into the trees and hide.

  Rather, it seemed that for a society like Norway, one that has such self-belief, to comprehend what Breivik had done they had to focus more on the failure of the individual, his mother and the police response, not on their own gun laws or their own failings as a country. Maybe this was the right response, though. After all, you can’t let one idiot with a gun change the way you live. If you do that, then they win.

  With that thought, I said goodbye to Aage. The blackness of what the mass shooter was capable of was in danger of consuming my attention. The more you looked into that abyss, the more your gaze was held. So I shifted my focus onto something else, but equally sinister: the way of the assassin.

  Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the person who first inadvertently introduced me to the dark world of the assassin was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time, precisely because he feared one of their bullets.

  It was a late springtime London when I received a phone call from someone I had never spoken to before, and they asked me if I would like to meet a man I had never met. I was told this could be of real interest to me, and on hearing his name I thought the same. Julian Assange – the Australian provocateur, a Scarlet Pimpernel for our digital age – wanted to talk.

  Julian was at London’s choice venue for hard-bitten hacks and war correspondents, the Frontline Club in Paddington. Heading there, I found him holed up in one of their rooms, being interviewed by CNN. Nervous and a little self-conscious, he was unused to the media spotlight and here he was being asked about a set of documents his whistleblowing organisation, Wikileaks, had just released: a cache of military reports that exposed the truth about America’s war in Afghanistan.

  Julian had some of the most controversial secret documents ever to find their way to the light of day. Millions of files from the US diplomatic and military operations overseas that had been leaked by their soldier Bradley Manning. And I was there, as the editor of the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, to see if my outfit could have a peek. Julian, interested in the Bureau’s ability to make documentary films, was keen to see if the contents of another set of files, this time the Iraq War military reports, could end up on TV channels the world over.

  It was a treasure trove of documents that proved there were war crimes and human rights abuses, incompetence and intrigues on the part of the US military in Iraq. And Julian gave it over, countless classified military files, on a USB stick in a Lebanese restaurant near Paddington station.

  As I got to know Julian, his appearance changed considerably as the world focused more and more on what he had leaked. He lost weight, dyed his hair bleach blond, took on a lined tiredness. But there was one thing that was constant: his bulletproof vest. He feared a CIA attack, that he was an assassin’s target, and I couldn’t help but look at the bulky blue vest and think: headshot.

  A few days after giving the Bureau the files on the Iraq War, I was told by Julian to download a messenger system called Jabber. It was an encrypted service that lets people talk relatively securely. So that night, as London foxes barked outside my window and the streets were silent in sleep, I logged on and began a conversation with one of the most controversial men in the world at that time.

  Caught in the green-blue glow of a screen, I was told to download certain applications, and his terse words guided me through a portal I had never known existed. I felt ashamed at my technological illiteracy. He told me about TOR, a system that allows its users to search the internet without their computer’s address being revealed. One that lets you look at websites untraced, because TOR wraps your servers’ information around other servers’ information, hiding you behind peeled layers of anonymity, like an onion.

  Clearly, the head of Wikileaks needed the anonymity that TOR offers, just like investigative journalists do. But some others do not. Others use TOR not out of need, but desire. For many things lurk deep in the hearts of men, and if you give them a tool to hide their identities they will use it.

  Within minutes I had access to sites that sold things like $20 syringes full of HIV positive blood, a vendetta’s stabbing tool. Where you could buy a soldier’s skull from Verdun for $5,000. Where fake euros cost a fraction of the real price. There was even an encyclopedic portal of links to ugly places I did not care for. Websites like ‘Pedofilie’ or ‘Boyloverforum’. Places that offered you the chance to commission drug experiments on homeless people. There was the opportunity to purchase snuff films made to order. You could buy the contact details of ‘crooked port and customs officials’ or ‘discreet lawyers and doctors’. And then there were the sites that promised assassinations.

  ‘Unfriendly solution’ was one. The text was chilling, if a word of it was true.

  ‘I will “neutralize” the ex you hate, your bully, a policeman that you have been in trouble with, a lawyer, a small politician . . . I do not care what the cause is. I will solve the problem for you. Internationally, cheap and 100 per cent anonymously.’

  The text continued: ‘The desired victim will pass away. No one will ever know why or who did this. On top of that I always give my best to make it look like an accident or suicide . . . I don’t have any empathy for humans anymore. This makes me the perfect professional for taking care of your problems . . . I’ll do ANYTHING to the desired victim.’ The price varied. For non-authority, ‘normal’ people the cost was between €7,000 and €15,000.

  Another site, ‘The Hitman Network’, offered a team of three contract killers in the US and the European Union. They charged $10,000 for a US hit, $12,000 for an EU one. They had two rules: ‘No children under 16 and no top 10 politicians.’

  Of course on the dark web you have no idea who is and who is not genuine. It could just be some fat guy called Bob sitting in his underpants in his mother’s loft in Illinois. Or a cop. After all, the US’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has
acknowledged it runs agents who pose as fake hit men, men who wear the jewellery, sleeveless tank tops and facial hair of biker gangs, entrapping those who seek guns for hire.35

  In a twist of irony, it was even alleged that Ross Ulbricht, the supposed founder of Silk Road – a TOR portal that sells all manner of narcotics, drugs and illegal services – commissioned the murder of six people through hitmen he had contacted on the internet.36 Nobody was actually murdered, although the FBI did say they had faked the death of one former employee of Silk Road and claimed they had convinced Ulbricht the murder had taken place. Ulbricht reportedly wired $80,000 to pay for the hit, though none of this has been proven in court.37

  But some of those on the dark web might, just might, be genuine. Because there are definitely men out there who earn a bloody living using the gun in an ugly and vicious way, and there have been for some time.

  The first gun assassin to enter the history books appears to have been a Scotsman – James Hamilton. When James Stewart, the half brother of Mary Queen of Scots, was acting as regent for her son, he was shot dead by Hamilton. The sniping Scot, in support of Mary, had fired the lethal shot from an archbishop’s window, through a line of washing. Since then, we have seen world leaders gunned down in their cars, on motel balconies and in theatres, a single bullet spinning a nation into a state of mourning, spurring on a legion of conspiracy theories, and even triggering world events that have claimed the lives of millions.

  So President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC by actor John Wilkes Booth, wielding a Philadelphia Derringer with a black walnut stock inlaid with silver.38 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down in the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, wearing such a tight uniform that some speculate it even helped speed his death.39 And a host of others have fallen to the assassin’s bullet, Tsar Nicholas II, Mahatma Gandhi, President Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X among them, victims of the powerful political symbolism the assassin’s bullet delivers; potent propaganda in a bloody deed.