by Iain Overton
Then there are those communities that gather not just to shoot, but to dress up, cook and enjoy the sheer spectacle of it all. For me this community intrigued the most – because their actions seemed much more about pleasure than power. This was why, with such a choice of communities in the US to meet, I alighted upon the group that both pursued joy through gunfire and also summed up the deep-rooted truths of Americana: the rootin’ shootin’ cowboy.
Brad L. Meyers prefers to go by the name ‘Hipshot’. When you call him this, his face lights up. This Michigan-born southern Californian has been many things in his seventy-odd years – a student, a marine biologist, a carpenter – but his passion is for Single Action Shooting, of which he is president of the national society. This means he enjoys dressing up as a cowboy and blazing away with his pistol.
Hipshot has always loved the Old West; the gunslingers of the OK Corral were the heroes of his childhood. The others on the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) board – or the Wild Bunch – have similar passions and names. Here in the cowboy shooting community you have to have an alter ego. So there’s a Judge Roy Bean, a General US Grant and a Tex – Wyatt Earp and Butch Cassidy have long been claimed. They say their particular form of sport – Cowboy Action Shooting, around since 1982 – is the fastest-growing outdoor shooting sport in the US; they’ve now got over 97,000 weekend cowboys in eighteen countries worldwide.
‘It’s a celebration of the cowboy lifestyle. Last year 900 people made it to our End of Trail annual meeting, where we had twelve stage matches taking place,’ Hipshot said in a gravelly voice, explaining that ‘stages’ comprise a series of plates that ring when hit.
Hipshot looked the part, manning the society’s stand at a Midwestern gunshow dressed in leather boots, shiny pinstriped trousers, a dapper frock coat and a wild rag of a red bandana around his neck. He stood out starkly among the tactical police gear on sale in the cavernous exhibition, but the required dress for society shooting events is western clothing typical of the time, so there was little else for it. He pointed down to his outfit.
‘All of this grew out of a concept of “What would a soldier of fortune have looked like 100 years ago?” Of course, the entire Wild West period was for a very short time – about twenty years, the space between the civil war and when trains started hauling cattle.’
‘So why do you do this?’ I asked Hipshot, nodding at his garb.
‘Oh, we come for so many reasons. Some like the dressing-up; some like the cowboy way, where a man’s word and handshake was his bond; some are gun collectors; some are western film buffs; and some are just into the shooting.’ They come in their luxury recreational vehicles and in the evenings light up a barbeque, crack open sweating cans of beer and enjoy the silence of the stars. And you believe Hipshot when he says they pose no threat. That there are very few accidents at their meetings. Nobody locks their trailers and trucks, and nothing is ever stolen.
It’s a world that sounded a little seductive, as fantasy worlds often do. A world separated from the endlessly sad statistics of some 30,000 annual gun deaths in the US.21 One even at odds with its own past: Dodge City’s first local government law was actually to ban the carrying of firearms – the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral kicked off because Wyatt Earp was trying to enforce a similar law.22
But such historical truths did not bother Hipshot. ‘It’s all about fantasy. But it’s a life, too. I’ve developed lifelong friends, who I’d never have met in any other way. We have a saying: “They come for the gun and stay for the people.”’
Camaraderie based around guns is far from new. Gun clubs date back to the Middle Ages; one of the first recorded was the St Sebastianus Shooting Club in Cologne, set up in 1463.23 But it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the sport went mainstream, with organisations such as the National Rifle Association in the UK leading the way. They held their first competition on Wimbledon Common in July 1860, and so appealing was the skill of marksmanship that Queen Victoria graced that fine day, probably with half an eye towards encouraging the skill of sharpshooting to help keep her Empire intact. She even raised a rifle to her unflinching face and fired the first round.24 With that queenly shot, the sport of shooting was fixed with a royal seal of approval and its reputation was further boosted nearly four decades later, when shooting was listed as one of the sports in the modern Olympics. It was this community of sport shooters that I was drawn to next.
Today, shooting is a major competitive industry, spawning thousands of national and international sporting events and featuring in every Olympic Games since 1896.25 Of course, it has undergone significant changes since its early days. Targets were once the shape of humans or animals, but after the Second World War this was phased out for round targets to avoid an association with guns and bloody violence.26 But back in the 1900 Olympic games in Paris, such sensitivities were far from the organisers’ minds. They held a live pigeon-shooting event – the first and only time in Olympic history when animals were killed purposefully.27 Nearly 300 birds died that day, and the event proved to be such carnage, with the cries of dying birds and rivulets of blood staining the stadium sand, that even the stomachs of the French audience turned.
If that event was short-lived, the duelling event was even less popular. That competition, held in the 1906 and 1912 games, had the competitors facing dummies, not love rivals, dressed in sombre overcoats. Bull’s-eyes were pinned to the mannequins’ throats.28 It was too raw a sight to last.
These quickly ditched sports reflect the wider chaotic history of the early modern Olympics – like when Russia’s military shooting team arrived in London for the 1908 games nearly two weeks after it had ended. They were following the Julian calendar, while Britain was on the Gregorian calendar.
Despite these birthing pains, shooting has since emerged as a major sport. In 1896 there were just five events. By the London Olympics of 2012 there were fifteen: nine for men, six for women.29 Such shooting matches require intense focus and a skill so exact that marksmen use techniques to lower their pulse to half its normal rate, firing between heartbeats.30
It has a history, too, filled with wonderful distractions, like the fact the oldest Olympian was a shooter – the Swede Oscar Swahn. He took part in the 1920 Belgian Olympics at the age of seventy-two, winning a silver medal for the double-shot running deer contest. Or the story of the Hungarian pistol shooter Károly Takács, who, after his shooting hand was badly maimed by a grenade, taught himself to aim with his left hand. He went on to take gold in the 25m rapid fire pistol competition in the 1948 London Games.31
However sporting, though, where there is shooting – unless properly contained – death can often be seen lurking in the shadows. In 2000, three Colombian gunmen tried to kidnap the former Olympic target shooter Bernardo Tovar and his son of the same name. Father and son were coming back from practising and were armed. The younger Bernardo fired his .22 calibre pistol, killing two of his three attackers and wounding the third.
But is such a thing inevitable, I wondered. Can you have sports shooting without violence? Was the peaceful pastime of amateur cowboys the exception or the rule? Do guns inevitably alter things for the worse? I had encountered so much death on my journey that I was sceptical about whether you could have guns without tragedy. But one place I had read about appeared to prove me wrong.
In the distance was the Esja, a volcanic range whose western parts, formed some 3 million years ago, rose to rain-laden heights. Its summit, 780 metres from the speckled sea, lay hidden from view. A thick grey wedge of cloud had spilled down its sides and covered the sky, and beneath its clouded rim, across the freezing waters of Kollafjörður bay, the sound of gunshot sounded in the whitened air.
I had travelled a short distance from the Icelandic capital of Reykjavík, a city washed in the cold, perpetual light of a northern summer, to attend the final day of the national skeet shooting competition. Thirty-one men were there, and some, dressed in tracksuits with their cold metal sh
otguns made safe, hanging like broken sticks over their blue and black tabards, waited in quiet clusters. They sat with the patience of men who were used to silence and the passing of slow days.
Others were below, down a small hill. There they stood with focused gazes beside semi-circles of grey concrete markings. The stations from where the clay skeet targets were fired were positioned on each side, and each shooter would, when called, quietly take his place on the concrete roundels. Then they would tense, shout a single call and, following the speeding blur from its trap, shoot the orange discs down in their hurried flight. Across the ground a thousand splinters of clay were strewn – the satisfying remnants of success.
Crack went the rifles and then, if a second target was let loose, a crack would ring out again across the empty bay. Twenty-five targets in each round, five rounds in total – each downed target a point. The shooter who hit the most won; 125 points was the maximum but few achieved this perfect score.
Guðmann Jónasson, a forty-year-old plumber, was up next. He had been shooting for ten years, and the sport defined his life. His fiancée was also a shooter and held the title of national female champion. Jónasson too had won awards. He was willing to sink almost a million kroner a year into this weekend diversion with its English-bought shotguns and 24-gram rounds from Sweden. Today he was not on best form. He had scored 59 points out of a possible 75. The man in the lead was on 67. Telling me this, Guðmann shrugged his tracksuited shoulders and smiled. In a land where a volcano might wipe your home out, there is always that sense of perspective, I guess.
‘We have the most shooting grounds per capita in the world. You know Copenhagen?’ Guðmann said, rotating an empty Styrofoam coffee cup in his thick hands. ‘They have four shooting ranges. And they are a big city.’ He paused for effect. ‘We have ten.’ He looked pleased.
With just over 300,000 people, Icelanders pride themselves on their world firsts. They tell you they have the world’s oldest mollusc; they eat the world’s healthiest diet; they have the most Nobel Laureates per capita; and the highest per capita consumption of Coca-Cola. This uniqueness was why I had come. Despite the fact that Iceland ranks as one of the highest per capita countries in terms of legal gun ownership, its homicide rate is so low it falls to zero in some years. In 2012, 50,108 people were murdered in Brazil and 14,827 people were killed in the US. One person died violently in Iceland.32
The crime statistics office in Reykjavík sometimes gets a call from the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva. They are told that their figures must be incorrect; nobody has so few murders. Then they tell the bureaucrat that this is Iceland, and nobody has been murdered for quite a while now. So rare an event is murder that when, in 2013, a fifty-nine-year-old man was shot and killed by Icelandic police, the incident was front-page news for days. It even resulted in a national apology from the country’s top policeman. But this is understandable because it was the first time the country’s police force had shot and killed anybody, ever.
Yet despite all of this, there are still guns here in Iceland aplenty. About 1 per cent of the Icelandic population belongs to a gun club, and an estimated 90,000 guns exist in this fire-licked land of a third of a million people.33 I had come to the edges of the Arctic Circle precisely because of this. I wanted to understand how so many guns and so little gun crime could co-exist.
So I asked Guðmann if anybody had been accidentally killed in sports shooting, and he said nobody had been hurt in the gun club since 1867, its foundation. He said an insurance agent had once reviewed his books to calculate the premium a gun club should be paying. But the man had found nothing under the column for gun claims. For amateur dancing things were different.
‘Oh, there were pages and pages of accidents for ballet and salsa clubs,’ Guðmann said, his eyes twinkling. ‘It seems that here in Iceland we are probably better at shooting than we are at dancing.’
Many of the other shooters were indoors; even on a July day like this the weather had sent them inside for thick vegetable soup and layers of butter-lined bread. I walked back up into the modest prefab clubhouse. There a poster showed the classifications of guns: Riffilgreinar cal .22; Skambyssa; Fribyssa .22. The words lingered on your tongue. But what caught my eye was the untended gun rack with four shotguns propped up in it.
I thought of El Salvador, and how guns could never be left like this. Here in Iceland the front door of the club was wide open. There were no guards. But they didn’t need tight security here. Everyone knew everyone – Iceland ranks 169 out of 193 countries in the world in population size; a killer has, basically, nowhere to hide. The names on the competitor board paid testimony to this. Jöhannsdóttir, Valdimarsson, Helgason – all Icelandic. It once was the case that, if you emigrated here, you had to adopt an Icelandic name, as laid down by the National Name Council, it was that homogeneous.
I ambled back into the bleached day and down to the range to watch Guðmann. He walked to the centre of the concrete semi-circle and paused, focus visible in his tense back. He called out, and a shot sounded, and the spinning orange clay target exploded in the bloodless air.
Names are a big thing in Iceland.
In the phone book all people are listed alphabetically by their first names. Children address adults by their first names, and adults certainly address everyone else by their first names – even when talking to the president or, as everyone knows him, Ólafur. The phone book then lists the person’s last name, their profession and, finally, their home address.
The professional listings, though, are different. They do not have to be backed up with hard evidence that you do what you claim to do. So Iceland has six winners, nine sorcerers, eighteen cowboys, fourteen ghostbusters and two hen-whisperers. In this way, if you pick up a phone book and look in between Jón Heidar Óskarsson and Jón Pálsson, you’ll find that Iceland has two Jón Pálmasons. And the one that I wanted to speak to was Jón Pálmason, skotveiðimaður, because, while this Jón Pálmason was an electrician by trade, he had a different title here. Here he was ‘a man who hunts animals with a gun’.
I had been told that this Jón Pálmason was the best person to speak to if I really wanted an answer to a question that I had. He was happy to talk, and so we met on Bankastræti – the main bar street in Reykjavík – and headed for a coffee. Jón was a handsome man, with silver hair and the complexion of someone who lived in a place with the best diet in the world.
I got straight to the point.
‘On the one hand there is Central America,’ I said, ‘a place where guns are often in the hands of small groups of men who are not afraid to use them. Then you have Iceland, with a tiny homicide rate and yet with one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. And my question is – how come?’
He started off explaining that Iceland’s low level of violence was partly down to regulation: all automatic and semi-automatic rifles, and most handguns, were banned. Then he explained that acquiring a gun is not an easy process: you need a medical examination, have to attend a gun handling course and then you need to pass a suitability test at the police station.
‘But you don’t need to have a gun under your pillow here, to protect yourself,’ he explained. ‘We only need guns here for three reasons. First to hunt, second for sport and third for the very few here who collect guns. No one has them for self-defence. We have no army, no war, and there are so few people here that I think it leads to a sense of peace.’
There was, he said, a tradition in Iceland of pre-empting crime issues before they arise, or stopping issues before they can get worse. Right now, police were cracking down on Hell’s Angels gangs, while members of the Icelandic parliament, the Althingi, were considering laws to increase police powers in the investigation of their country’s small biker networks.
It seemed that dialogue formed the basis of order here. A few hundred metres from where we were sitting there was a monument. They called it ‘the black cone’ – a split rock that served as a tribute to civil diso
bedience.
‘When the government violates the rights of the people then insurrection is, for the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties,’ a plaque beside it read, quoting the eighteenth-century philosopher Gilbert du Motier, better known as the revolutionary Marquis de Lafayette. This was not far from the American fear of a despotic government taking control. But the US response was to buy guns in anticipation of Armageddon. Here in Iceland they insisted on democratic process and tolerance.
Much of this was food for thought. But I still wanted to get to the root of how such a tolerance and measured response could have evolved. So, after meeting Jón, I drove out of the capital and into Iceland’s riverine world of igneous rock and streaming rain.
The man behind the desk at the car-hire company had joked it had only rained twice this year in Iceland. ‘The first for twenty-five days, and now for seventy-five days.’ I laughed then, but the torrent was now so bad that my windscreen momentarily flooded, and I felt like I was drowning. On either side stretched an undulating world of soaked moss and ancient tholeiite boulders, and my car sluiced through along the road-river.
Forty kilometres out, and, unexpectedly, it rose before me: a hard wall of rock, overlooking a landscape of arterial brooks and eddying rivers. It was the Þingvellir – the ancient Icelandic parliament. Around it dwarf birch trees and moss campion sprouted from craggy rises and purple sandpipers, their backs a spread of diamond rain drops, flew into the whiteness at the sound of my approaching car.