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

by Iain Overton

  New York’s Museum of Modern Art was as good place as any to start. If there was going to be an edgy and artistic interpretation of the way that guns impact modern culture, a culture that reflects the use of guns, then surely MOMA was going to have it. At $25 a ticket, they’d better have, anyway.

  That entry price certainly doesn’t buy you much advice. Walking through the minimalist glass and steel interior, I made my way over to the information desks. They were manned by black-polo-necked volunteers and one, a camp man who told me he was from the Upper East Side, on being asked if there were any paintings in the museum with guns in them, suggested I should, perhaps, look it up on the internet.

  But I didn’t have any internet connection and so instead I decided to walk the galleries. I’d come here, on my way back from Washington, assuming they’d have the Lichtenstein Takka Takka image of a machine-gun blazing away, or Warhol’s silkscreen Elvis Presley in a gunslinger pose.50 But they had neither, and even their show ‘American Modern’, despite its endless Midwestern vistas and shady representations of street-corner cafés and secret losses, had no rifles or pistols.

  So I paced the gallery floors, past students copying masterworks into sketchpads and young Japanese lovers in front of giant Rothko screens of green and blue, looking for images of firearms. Eventually I came across a sparse and threatening image called Gun with Hand #1 by Vija Celmins.51 And that, pretty much, was it. The title of Celmin’s painting accurately described what it represented and – as with so much of the world of guns that I had seen – it allowed you to project your own prejudices and assumptions onto its starkness. But it was just one image in the centre of America’s beating cultural heart.

  Then it struck me – that the issue of the gun here in America, even though it claims over 30,000 lives a year – is largely ignored by the liberal coastal elites. You see it in America’s mass media aplenty, but when it comes to opera, galleries and design museums, the gun is notable for its absence.52

  It’s not just MOMA. The Boston Museum of Art refuses to display firearms because they don’t think guns are high art.53 The Tate Modern in the UK has only three artworks that show a gun in its whole collection. London’s Design Museum has only one – an AK47. And of the 200 or so firearms in New York’s Metropolitan Museum’s gun collection, none were made after 1900.54 Those on display show great craftsmanship and decorative lustre, but they are not on show for their functionality. It’s as if – in the curator’s ideological view of the world – the modern gun is too ugly, too functional, too damn ‘street’.

  Of course there are reasons why this is so. There is the legacy of museums evolving out of philanthropic largesse – where collections were established on the basis of their beauty not their function. The safety implications for housing a gun in a collection might also be of relevance. As is the fact that many curators might think guns are things best found in armoury museums, not design museums.

  Lurking within all of this, though, seems to be the concern that if you put a gun in a design or culture museum, as opposed to a military one, you somehow legitimise it. As Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at MOMA, said in an interview: ‘Showing a firearm meant endorsing the firearm, endorsing its lethal power, endorsing its violent potential. It’s about endorsing evil, in a way.’55

  Yet, despite this curatorial control on elite tastes, the gun still has a huge influence on culture that cannot be denied. Gun metaphors long ago crept into our everyday chatter. Trends are called a ‘flash in the pan’ (what happens when gunpowder flares but the bullet doesn’t fire); things ‘fizzle’ out (a muzzle-loading rifle ‘fizzles’ when it misfires); you ‘bite the bullet’ (wounded troops were once given bullets to put between their teeth as they underwent surgery). And others. You ‘keep your powder dry’, ‘take potshots’, use ‘bullet’ points.56

  In terms of popular culture, the gun seems as ubiquitous. Of the top fifty films listed on the International Movie Database (IMDB) there are few that don’t involve the use of guns in their plot. Levels of gun violence in mainstream American films have more than doubled since 1950, and the levels of gun violence in PG-13 rated films now outpace those of R-rated films.57

  These films often tell a singular story, one suffused with an American view of popular culture that says: ‘The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.’58 From Bruce Willis’s John McClane to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, the American story is of the lone man forced to take matters into his hands, often with the aid of a gun. In the story, violence is usually regenerative: someone has to be shot so society can regain its peace and identity.

  The trouble is that these ploys and plots have consequences.

  Hollywood’s influence on gun culture cannot be dismissed. When American celluloid gangsters used sawn-off shotguns, so did real-life gangsters; one study in four US states found that 51 per cent of incarcerated US juveniles once owned one.59 When assault rifles were used in Rambo and Miami Vice in the 1980s, sales took off in America. And I’ve seen gang members posing, holding their pistols sideways – a terrible way to aim a gun – and was not surprised to learn this was first done in the movies so that both the gun and the actor’s face could be seen on camera simultaneously.

  The dirty secret, though, is that the gun companies know all too well this Hollywood influence on sales and seek to build close relationships with prop houses.60 Smith & Wesson, for instance, once reportedly hired a firm called International Promotions, a company that specialised in product placement, to push its firearms on the silver screen.61 In 2010, Brandchannel, a website that spots product placement, gave Glock a lifetime achievement award after their guns appeared in over 15 per cent of that year’s box-office-topping films.62

  The gun’s cultivated imposition on American mass media has far-reaching consequences. Researchers have repeatedly looked at what happens when children are exposed to violent media and concluded that it increases aggression and is a ‘significant risk to health’, something endorsed by six leading US health pediatric organisations.63 The saturation of guns in films normalises them, reinforcing to many the belief that you need one to survive. And that, as another study found, ‘the presence of weapons in films might amplify the effects of violent films on aggression’.64

  It’s not just films, though, that hold influence. When it was reported that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook mass shooter, had obsessively played the computer game Call of Duty in his basement, the media latched on to the influence of computer-game-inspired violence.65 Certainly the popularity of ‘first-person shooter games’ is huge and, with their very realistic portrayal of mass gun death, can make gaming companies very tidy profits. Call of Duty brought in over half a billion dollars in just one day in 2013.

  Other games have even seen brand partnerships that take entertainment into advertising; highlighted by videos such as those showing Medal of Honor’s executive producer and a representative from the gun company Magpul looking at weapon accessories together.66

  The link between violence and the influence of computer games, though, seems more nuanced than with film. The American Psychological Association concluded in one review that computer games have many positive effects on children; in some cases even violent games can have some beneficial impact. There are data to suggest games such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty may have helped bring about a drop in crime levels.67 Perhaps these games allow the taming of violent urges through play. Perhaps it’s because games take up a huge amount of time, keeping young men from trouble. What we do know is that there is no hard proof that video games cause violence.68

  What is also clear is that it’s impossible to look properly at gun owners without seeing them through the prism of gender and culture, because sex and environment form the very ideologies that make people feel they need guns in the first place.

  But where there is sex, there is also money. Profit follows pleasure, as night follows day. So I shifted my gaze once more and began to do what investigativ
e journalists always do: follow the money.

  V. Profit

  12. THE TRADERS

  Lords of War and global markets – the largest gun show on earth, Las Vegas, Nevada – selling patriotism and fear – conversations with AK47 dealers and arms traders – how guns end up in the hands of human rights abusers – France: Europe’s largest arms fair in Paris – stonewalled by the Chinese, bullied by the Russians – Ukraine – shady arms ports in Oktyabrsk and intrigue in Odessa

  The legal international trade in guns and ammunition is thought to be worth about $8.5 billion a year.1 I was surprised when I read this. I had expected higher. But there it was: the sale of guns was less than 10 per cent of the conventional global arms trade, even though firearms can account for up to 90 per cent of casualties in conflicts.2

  This figure also revealed another misconception on my part – possibly one formed by films such as Lord of War, where Nicholas Cage plays a debauched and corrupt US-Ukrainian arms dealer supplying Africa’s wars with endless weapons. I had assumed many guns were smuggled illegally around the world. Not so. The vast majority of the trade – as much as nine-tenths – begins in legal transfers.3

  Almost all guns start their lives in legally run factories, and such shipments of new guns have usually been stamped and approved by some ink-stained bureaucrat along the way. It’s only later that they end up in a dirty supply chain run by smugglers and traffickers and pushed into ugly corners of violence and despair.

  When compared to the global trade in drugs ($321 billion)4 or people trafficking ($32 billion),5 the legal trade in guns seems regulated and modest. At least until you see, as I had done, how devastating a gun in the wrong hands can be.

  It’s a market, though, that is growing. The global pistol and revolver trade more than tripled in value between 2003 and 2013.6 As UN data shows, by 2013 almost 31 million firearms and parts were being traded by ninety-four countries worldwide.7 In one year alone the US imported about $0.8 billion of guns and exported $0.4 billion.8 This is just exports. Domestic sales add more guns, more millions of dollars. Over 98 million firearms were sold by Americans to Americans between 1986 and 2010.9 Adding international and domestic markets together, it is clear that the US’s influence on international trade in guns is not only dominant but a game changer. Without them, the world’s relationship with the gun – and the numbers of guns – would be markedly different.

  The simple fact is this: all the major gun companies rely on the Second Amendment to maintain profits. The right to bear arms is more than a matter of principle – it’s serious business.

  There are over 5,000 gun shows in America each year. The biggest by far, not only in the US but in the whole world, was Las Vegas’s Shot Show.10 Based at the Sands Expo Center, it was a behemoth of an event. It had grown and grown over the years until, bloated, it now spread over 635,000 square feet, with 1,600 exhibitors. It was a floor space that was the equivalent of walking into Terminal 5 at New York’s Kennedy airport and finding it filled with guns. If there was one place under the sun to understand the business of guns, this surely had to be it.

  The day before my meeting with the porn actress Stoya, I had secured a ticket for this monster of an event. That morning, I decided to walk there from my hotel, having booked into the cheapest room on the Strip, a slip of a room in the MGM Grand. But as this was Vegas, I was taken in by an illusion. It was the magic of perspective that got me. The MGM is the largest hotel in the US, so it had the effect of making everything seem closer than it really was. An hour in, and I was still walking past drunks and lunging couples on their return from the night before. Then the mood shifted. My path was joined by stern-faced, bearded men. They wore khaki, black polo shirts and sculpted baseball caps. Wrap-around shades hid their eyes.

  We fell into step, and I started chatting to one of them. His name was Jake. ‘I survived the Gun Control Panic of 2013 and all I got was this T-shirt . . . and 20,000 rounds of .22 LR, 5,000 rounds of 5.56, 50 PMAGS, 10 stripped lowers, 3 reloading presses . . . and an angry spouse,’ was written on the back of his T-shirt. He was from Idaho and ran an ammunition company. He had recently bought a reloading machine for just over a thousand dollars and had spent most of the previous year assembling the individual parts of bullets – hull, primer, powder and shot – then selling them on. It came out a third cheaper than factory-loaded ammo, and he had made $430,000 in sales. We were still ten minutes from the show, and you could already smell the money.

  We walked into a mildly hallucinatory section of the Vegas Strip – a kitsch reincarnation of Venice, without the soul or the sewage. Passing concrete pink colonnaded bridges and barbershop-painted poles, Jake moved on ahead through a set of double doors. I followed. A casino lay between us and the convention centre, and the floor was lined with intensely coloured carpets, disruptive patterns designed to stimulate your eyes and keep you in a permanent state of wakefulness. Each minute you remained conscious was a minute more where a dollar could be stripped from you. There were no windows; the only stars Vegas wanted you to see were the Botoxed ones on stage.

  The shrill sound of slot machines whirred in the close air. Some of the show’s visitors peeled off to try their luck.11 Even more joined the stream, and, like a shoal of salmon, the crowd surged and spilled down a staircase to the entrance.

  There were 67,000 visitors here. In the first Shot Show in 1979, 5,600 people had turned up. But these vast, flowing lines consisted only of those who made a living out of guns. Casual visitors were not allowed at this trade show. The tumult spoke of an industry of a quarter of a million jobs, worth some $6 billion.12 There are more gun shops in the US than petrol stations. At almost 130,000, there are about ten times the number of federally licensed firearms dealers in the US than McDonald’s.13 And the dealers are overwhelmingly middle-aged, white and male; just looking at the legions here told you that. There wasn’t a black face in the whole crowd.14

  I picked up a lanyard from an unsmiling man in a booth and entered the show. As far as the eye could see, there were adverts and banners, logos and pavilions all devoted to guns: 13 miles of aisles filled with everything from small, family-run operations through to international firearm consortiums. Here were gun producers whose names conjured up cowboys and freedom fighters, despots and liberators: Colt and Kalashnikov, Smith & Wesson, Heckler & Koch.

  The show, prorated into huge halls, was divided like the steps of my journey – hunters and sportsmen, police and military. A biker pushed past me, swastikas tattooed onto his layered, fleshy neck. I wondered if there was a section for criminals. I took a hard right down the main drag, into the section for law enforcement.

  The organisers had included this category twelve years earlier. Then it covered 7,000 square feet; today it was twenty-four times that. Dummies covered in SWAT team gear stood on all sides; enormous banners displayed helmeted men with angry eyes. On each side were logos and marketing creeds: ‘Illumination tools that serve and protect,’ read one for a torchlight company; ‘For those who train with a higher purpose,’ read another, and it felt like a muscular prayer.

  I walked towards a booth selling SWAT equipment. ‘Leave achievement and destruction in the path behind you,’ declared its banner. A mountain of a man, a gun trader from Oregon, was there, trying on a bulletproof vest. His sides were exposed like slabs of butcher’s meat. He said that ever since Obama had spoken about looking at the issue of gun violence following the massacre at Sandy Hook, a sort of fever had gripped this country. Rumour had taken hold that the government was coming after your pistols and your rifles.

  ‘There was a frenzy of people coming through my doors. Obama was the best gun salesman in the US,’ he said. ‘I brokered deals for $500 guns that then sold for $2,000.’

  An obese woman walked into me, forcing me back with her width. Her red T-shirt read ‘I carry a gun ’cause a cop is too heavy’. The fat on her back caused the letters to bulge. I turned back, but the gun trader was already in another conversation.
Business was brisk; cards and order forms passed between eager hands under company names like BlackHawk! and Warrior Systems.

  I walked over to the Colt pavilion: a monument to American gun culture. Men formed a silent echelon around a slew of black matt guns. These were the ever-popular, ever-contentious, auto-loading, assault-style weapons – military rifles designed for civilian use. They had scientific names like the LE901-16S and AR15A4, and these men lifted them with focused skill. They knew they could stock their shops with guns like these.

  So did the producers. In its 2011 annual report, Smith & Wesson said it saw a $489 million domestic, non-military market for these ‘modern sporting rifles’. From 2007 to 2011, according to the Freedom Group – the world’s largest gun conglomerate – US civilian rifle sales grew at 3 per cent a year, while those of assault weapons grew at a rate of 27 per cent.15 It was no surprise, then, to learn that eleven of the top fifteen gun makers manufactured them.

  The industry repeatedly says these semi-automatic weapons are for hunting and for target practice, but death – and the fear of death – stalks much of the civilian assault-weapon advertising. ‘Survival means different things to different people,’ said one of Colt’s older ads. ‘Take the shot of your lifetime!’ the company urged.16 Other companies did the same. ‘Flat Out. Lights Out’ was the tagline for one assault rifle. Another advert – brushed with crimson – was for a scope called ‘Revenge’.17

  Throughout the show death was a perpetual and unique selling point: killing here was marketed and promoted. A company called Gem-Tech produced silencers and said they were ‘62 Grains of quiet diplomacy’. One of their adverts had the catch-line: ‘Our only trace is a body where the enemy once stood’. Another company showed the image of a sniper’s rifle poking through a willowy grass verge. ‘Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man,’ read its copy.