by Iain Overton
But she did explain how, like the others here, she was forced to become a child soldier, because this was what the Liberian rebels were seeking. Those leaders knew that the AK47 was as deadly in the hands of a ten-year-old as it was in the hands of an adult.37 They knew that children don’t eat as much and don’t expect to be paid as much, if at all. That children are easier to brainwash and have a less acute sense of danger compared with adults.38 Such children, armed with guns, are able to commit terrible, terrible acts.
Then she told another story. Some days later these child soldiers captured another man. He was big, and they brought him to her. In front of him, they told her that he looked ‘greasy’ and that his fat would make a good meal. He pleaded for his life, but they cut him, stripping the skin off him as he screamed and screamed, until one of the young men must have felt a pang of something like humanity and put a bullet in his head. Then the rebels ordered her to carve him up, take out his heart, and make a soup for them.
She set about cutting and boiling, and in the early hours of the morning she had finished the stew. They woke from their sleep and crowded around. Eating the heart of this man, they believed, would make them stronger fighters, it would give them ‘jungle magic’ – and this meant bullets would pass around them in a firefight. But they feared being poisoned, so the rebels forced her to eat her dish before they ate their fill.
I pushed the fish around my bowl. The others in the group sat in silence, listening to the story. And then they joined in – they too had seen such things.
A pregnant woman, approaching a roadblock, was stopped by two rebel children with AK47s. They argued about the sex of her unborn child. To find out they took a knife to her belly and settled the matter.
A boy once wore the dried breasts and genitals of a woman he had killed with his pistol, adorning himself with these withered amulets so as to protect himself from harm.
Then there were those who drank the blood of other murdered children to boost their powers.
These were stories, or variations of stories, I had heard before. Horror stories know no bounds and I had met child soldiers not only here in Liberia but also in the Philippines, in Colombia, in Somalia and in Mozambique. Just some of the estimated 250,000 child soldiers in the world today, their existence as old as war itself,39 and they often told the same harrowing tales.
Here, shrouded by Liberia’s shading trees, these adults who once had killed as children talked long into the afternoon cool, telling tales of what happens if you make soldiers out of children and give immature hands guns to hold. War descends into a Lord of the Flies hell – a charnel house where immature morality is animalistic and where deadly acts are committed without regard.
Their tales got so dark that a doubt flickered in me. I wondered if they had begun to make up things just to shock me. But in the car on the way back Moses told me in a quiet voice that they had only scratched the surface of what had happened those years before in the hidden depths of the bush.
‘They were children with guns,’ he said. And then he asked if I had enjoyed lunch.
IV. Pleasure
9. THE CIVILIANS
The joy of shooting – Cambodia – shooting AK47s with a beauty queen in Phnom Penh – the American gun owner – meeting a gunslinger in the Midwest, USA – the evolution of gun sports – a journey north to Iceland, a land of many guns and few murders – meeting a sportsman beneath a volcano – understanding the culture of peace through punishment – the rarified world of the gun collector in Birmingham, UK
Guns are fun. I have no doubt about that. When used in the right way and in the right place, they can bring great satisfaction and pleasure. And by ‘the right way and in the right place’, what I mean is in a controlled and safe manner in a situation that threatens no one.
Of course, with these Faustian caveats a diabolical world of debate is conjured up. People argue endlessly about what constitutes ‘control’, what is meant by ‘safe’, and who is threatened. Many believe they are in control, they are safe. And what potentially despotic government has the right to say that you can’t protect yourself?
Civil liberties aside, though, I had to consider guns and their non-lethal use in the pursuit of such things as sport, pleasure and self-defence. After all, in 2007 it was estimated about three-quarters of the 875 million guns in the world were in private hands.
Of course, the numbers of civilian guns varies from nation to nation. From places where every other person has a gun, like Yemen, to lands where there is less than one gun for every 100 people, as in South Korea or Ghana.1 But overall the numbers of civilian-owned guns are distractingly large. India has about 46 million privately held firearms, China 40 million and Germany 25 million.2
As ever, it is the US that takes the prize, with almost one gun per person.3 Put simply, if you take India, China and Germany out of the equation, the US, with 270 million civilian guns, has more privately owned firearms than the rest of the world put together.4 No wonder American gun advocates call themselves an army.
But, as with everything related to guns, it’s difficult to trust these figures. Millions of small arms worldwide are owned that are never registered with the authorities. Many are registered but may long ago have rusted away or been stolen. And when you have situations like one where a de-activated gun for the film industry in one country might still need to be registered as a working firearm if exported to another,5 or where, as in the UK, certain air-pistols are included in the firearm count,6 figures cited are bound to be an indication only.
One truth, though, remains constant: when guns are used for sports and hobbies, communities evolve around them. And so a group of gun owners and shooters I wanted to consider were those who would gather to shoot without drawing blood; the groups who shoot socially, or competitively; those who keep guns for their peace of mind; and the cliques who expensively and expansively collect guns.
Perhaps above all of these, though, there was one type of shooter who intrigued me: those who do it for the sheer hedonistic hell of it.
Miss Cambodia had, as she said she would, appeared in a wedding dress and was preparing to shoot. The AK47 was handed to her, ready to fire. She raised the stock to her foundation-heavy face and, leaning forward, pulled the trigger. A sharp crack sounded, and at the end of the range, at the edge of a sharply outlined target of a charging warrior, a bullet left its mark. Wounded certainly, lethally possibly. Either way, you knew not to mess with a beauty queen with a semi-automatic.
It was 2001, and I was filming an adventure series across Asia; Cambodia was our first destination. Here the presenter, a journalist with the magazine FHM, had eaten deep-fried spiders, had his back ‘cupped’ by a traditional healer and taken part in a buffalo race. Now his challenge was to beat Miss Cambodia in a shooting competition, and so we were at the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces’ 70 Brigade Headquarters – the only firing range in this Indochinese country open to a paying public.7 It wasn’t exactly hard-hitting journalism.
The afternoon was heat-soaked. We had driven away from the genteel lanes of the French colonial capital of Phnom Penh, through a bordered world of rice paddies and fields of dry corn, until the distinctive crack of the Kalashnikov was heard, its sound filling the saturated air and echoing out towards the walls of the jungle.
The other visitors here were white tourists – Australians, Germans, Americans, Brits. It was popular to include a trip to a firing range with a visit to the Khmer Rouge-era S-21 prison. So, in the morning, these travellers had dragged themselves around Pol Pot’s interrogation centre – an innocuous three-floored former school, whose balconied walkways and bending palm trees belied its past life. There they stared at the faded photographs of souls killed by genocidal monsters and took pictures of ugly wire torture beds in once fear-filled rooms.
Afterwards they were driven to the Choeung Ek fields on the capital’s outskirts. Here Cambodia’s intellectual elites, teachers, doctors and journalists had once been taken in their thousa
nds to wet mud flats known then and forever more as the Killing Fields. And the Westerners learnt how Cambodia’s leaders had once been killed with an AK47 round in the back of their heads.
After witnessing these horrors, the tourists would then come to this range and shoot guns. Firing thirty rounds from a Kalashnikov cost them $40. For $70 they were able to let rip on an M-60, the US military’s machine-gun of choice in Vietnam. There were other packages for more extreme tastes. Lay down $350, and soldiers would drive you 30 kilometres east to a field in the Kampong Speu province. There a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher would be hoisted onto your shoulder. For another $200 you could fire it at a live cow. I guess if you can buy sex in Cambodia with a twelve-year-old for $10, then someone renting you a weapon to blow up an animal is nothing.
We were just after guns, though, and so in this languid air-force range we had laid down our dollar bills and lined up to take aim. Dogs roamed outside, instructors stretched idly in fly-touched hammocks or hustled at pool. And, in the heat of the afternoon, Miss Cambodia, Samoni, lifted her rifle again.
Behind her a screaming skull from the Airborne Unit insignia stared down. ‘Mess with the best, die like the rest,’ it read. Vietnam war clichés, I thought, and she fired another round and then another. The paratrooper gun instructor told her to lean into the gun, to expect its recoil. But Samoni had shot before and, as the cameras rolled, her bullets caused the sun-red earth down the range to pop in tiny eruptions, and a smile formed on her rouged lips.
Filming this beauty queen expertly unload a semi-automatic clip into a target was not just a slice of entertainment for television. It allowed us to touch on the terribleness of civil war. You make it engaging so people watch it, as it’s hard to film a mountain of skulls and make it popular. Do it like this, and you get 200 million people watching facts about horror and genocide.
The gun was certainly a way to tell that tale – the Khmer Rouge’s actions had led to the deaths of nearly 2 million of their own countrymen between 1975 and 1979, many of them with Chinese- and Russian-supplied rifles. These armed fighters, wrapped in their checkered kramas and communist ideologies, had spread like a virus from the jungles to the rice fields and then into the suburbs of the boulevard-lined cities, until the entire country had fallen under their control.
These men were not just interested in power. They wanted that thing that you should always fear when men have guns – they wanted to make a new society. So they began to dismantle and destroy what had gone before, in the name of a warped agrarian ideal, and the rule of the bullet was marked by the deaths of countless.
Guns flourished. Certainly you wouldn’t have had to come to this military range to fire one. Owning a high-velocity weapon wasn’t even illegal until 1998, and by then every third household in Cambodia was armed.8 But when the Khmer Rouge finally collapsed, the new government realised the revolution’s legacy of arms was fuelling criminal violence. So they introduced tougher gun laws and a massive buy-back scheme. Within sixteen years over 180,000 weapons had been destroyed. The local English newspaper, the Phnom Penh Post, was to report that guns had declined from being behind 80 per cent of all violence in 1994 to just 30 per cent a decade later.9
That’s why you had to come to a range to fire one. But shooting with Cambodia’s beauty queen was more than just entertainment. There was a peculiar truth present in that moment: a truth of just how quickly guns, even ones touched by genocide, can be used by tourists for fun, how quickly, in a stranger’s hands, a gun can shift from something feared to something desired.
Cambodians did not come here to shoot. Only tourists came here to pick up Uzis and Glock pistols and Thompson machine-guns, the remnants of Cambodia’s colonial and subverted revolutionary past. The pleasure these guns gave to foreigners was not diminished by what these guns had done.
I understood why. There was a time when I enjoyed guns for the pleasure they brought, and that alone. I used to be the head of a small gun club, a ramshackle affair of a wooden hut and a few tons of sand, where we shot rimfire .22 rounds on bucolic summer days. As a teenager I learned how to fire pistols and target rifles; I was trained to strip down a General-Purpose Machine-Gun in seconds. For a brief part of my youth, I even bought print magazines with names like Guns & Ammo. But then I began to travel to war zones and lands touched by the gun’s deadly sting. Guns lost their allure, and the memory of what they can do to a man took the pleasure from them. And I turned, in the terrified moment of that killing, from enjoying what guns brought to me to looking at the harm they brought to others.
For many, though, their view of guns has never been tainted in such a way. For them the gun is almost a way of life.
‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’
These twenty-seven words make up the Second Amendment, a constitutional right to bear arms that for many in the US lies at the heart of what it means to be an American. They have had an impact far deeper than was probably ever intended and have led to a country saturated with guns. A 2012 Congressional report found there to be about 310 million firearms there.10 Of course, not every American owns a gun – about two-thirds of them lie in the hands of just 20 per cent of gun owners.11 But in the Land of the Free, consumer logic has taken gun ownership to its extreme. Under US law, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System is used to see if someone can buy a gun from a dealer before they can walk out of the shop with it. The figures show that system received almost 157 million applications for guns between 1998 and November 2012.12
What those twenty-seven words also created was a situation where the gun is vibrantly visible in American culture. In some states, it’s a culture that has evolved into laws that let you carry a gun into a church or onto a college campus,13 or laws that say it is not a misdemeanour to shoot someone in self-defence if you are drunk.14 In some places they even permit you to sell a gun to a fourteen-year-old.15
It’s a right to bear arms that is also vigorously defended. Even modest gun controls – like proposals for background checks – are seen as dire infringements, ones that pave a lacerated route to despotism, because the first thing a tyrant does – so the theory goes – is take away the opposition’s guns. It means when a Missourian Republican, in all seriousness, wanted to make it a felony for his fellow lawmakers to propose new gun control laws, he was not laughed out of office.16 And when the city council of Nelson, Georgia, once tried to pass a law to make it illegal not to own a gun, the response of many was support, not shocked bewilderment.17
At first, like many Europeans, I did not understand such things. I found it easy to sneer at America’s love for the gun. But then I travelled across the broad width of this complicated land and, from diner to boardroom, listened to dozens upon dozens of gun owners. And from them I learned one central reality: that you cannot understand civilian gun ownership in the US without acknowledging the heavy burden of history and violence on the American psyche.
When the heavy gunfire of the English at the infamous battle of Culloden in 1746, for instance, snuffed out Bonnie Prince Charlie’s claim on the crown it also traumatised generations of Scots. In defeat, many of them left Britain. It was a Celtic exodus that led to the establishment of American towns with names born from sentimentality, like Perth in New York or Aberdeen in Maryland. And these tartan-wrapped communities brought with them the traumatic memories of clearances and English despotic rule.
These memories played an important part in the evolution of American culture, particularly in the southern states; one that has within its heart the central tenets of independence of spirit, the belief in a punitive route to justice and a deep distrust of the meddling of the state, all of which typify your American gun-loving patriot today.
This legacy partly explained, at least to me, why Americans have let forty-four states pass some form of law that lets gun owners carry concealed weapons,18 and why, after Flo
rida sanctioned the Stand Your Ground law – exonerating citizens who used deadly force when confronted by an assailant – twenty-three other states went ahead and did the same.
It also explained to me why those who have a gun for recreational shooting in the US number some 20 million strong, and why they spend an estimated $9.9 billion a year on their hobby – almost $500 per shooter.19 Why men and women across America form countless small clubs and societies dedicated to the gun. Hobbyists like those who gather in Arizona’s western desert at the Big Sandy Shoot, the largest outdoor shooting meet in the world. They meet twice a year at a stony range a quarter of a mile long and there blaze away with rifle and machine-gun. Over 1,000 targets litter the landscape: some that speed along the length of the range, others that explode in a burst of sparks when hit. And at the end of the weekend, with over 3.5 million rounds fired and their targets lying decimated upon the Arizonan soil, these shooters pack up and go back to their lives.
Then there are those civilians whose passion is for sniping. They sign up to $220-a-day training courses to do this. So popular are these courses that one US company sold over 20,000 of its $5,000 civilian-adapted RC-50s, a rifle capable of piercing an armoured vehicle from a mile away.20
Then there are those who go shooting for ideological reasons: to help America regain a path to redemption. This, at least, is the view of the people at Project Appleseed, folks who dedicate their weekends to the historical tradition of rifle marksmanship, using black powder rifles and historical sharpshooter techniques. They gather in isolated groves and hidden woodlands, convinced that their guns can renew national confidence, that the grand ideals of America – ethics, discipline, community – can be galvanised through gunfire.