by Iain Overton
It was an ambitious attempt to regulate the global arms trade. Groups such as Oxfam and Amnesty said the Arms Trade Treaty could reduce the trafficking of weapons to outlaw regimes and rebel groups involved in horrific atrocities against civilians.10 It wasn’t going to end armed violence tomorrow, they said, but it was a start. Behaviours like the ones I had glimpsed in the smuggling worlds of Ukraine and Mexico and Somalia needed to be changed over time, and this was one way to do it.
As it was, the treaty went to the wire, hampered partly by denunciations from Iran, Syria and North Korea.11 But on 2 April 2013 it was agreed.
This all sounds promising, but, however noble its ambition, the treaty’s global impact on firearms is far from guaranteed. As one lobbyist said to me, ‘We need to keep in mind the limitations of the ATT. The Treaty is not about banning transfers; it is about regulating them. And it is only about their transfer; it does not set rules about domestic control once they reach their destination . . . progress will take time.’
There is also the issue of getting key countries to agree to it. By early 2015, of the top fifteen gun-producing countries in the world only six had signed and ratified the treaty.12
The Arms Trade Treaty was not the first attempt to address the global scourge of guns, either. While that accord was about a wider array of weapons – from tanks to missiles – the UN had also seen attempts to specifically address the harm that guns cause. The most hopeful of these was the 2001 UN implementation of something called the Programme of Action.13 This was designed to encourage governments to combat the problem of illegal guns. It tried to ensure stockpiles were not plundered and spare guns were destroyed; that systems for marking and tracing guns were put in place; that things like end-user certificates were regulated so as to control the smuggler’s trade. All noble sentiments. But its progress has been slow. In 2012 four of the top fifteen small-arms producers – Austria, Belgium, China and North Korea – did not send a gun report to the UN.14 And some ask if the relationship of states with the Programme of Action is like ‘a loveless marriage, going through the motions with a fair amount of apathy, resignation, and lack of excitement or novelty’.15
Another endeavour, the UN Firearms Protocol, also set out to address the illicit trafficking and manufacture of guns.16 But, once again, of the top fifteen gun-producing countries in the world, only four – Belgium, Brazil, Italy and Turkey – signed and ratified it.17
The issue, then, does not seem to be the quality of the treaties and agreements on offer. Rather it is the lack of support for them from those who truly matter. Of the top fifteen arms producers in the world, only Italy has engaged fully in all three of the most important gun-related treaties.18 Perhaps the reason for this is that for many countries the idea of regulating the world’s guns sends their governments into paroxysms of concern. After all, guns are used in plenty of legitimate roles. Nations have the right to defend themselves, and there is always the issue of the personal right of self-defence, as Asher John in Pakistan or Gayle Trotter in Washington had argued. Though the protection of these rights should be weighed up against the overwhelming evidence that show more guns mean more murders.19
There is even some truth that comes from the mouths of hawkish American commentators: ‘The awful consequences of disarmament must not be ignored. Northern dough-faces agreed with the southern slavocracy that black people should not have guns; American progressives agreed with Stalin and Mao that only the government should have guns.’20
I have been blindfolded and led down humid paths to meet rebel groups fighting for their independence in the southern Philippines, or sat and spoken to the armed guards of refugee camps whose presence is the only thing that stops a massacre from happening. And in each place you are struck by that deep quandary – that there comes a time when a gun seems to be the only thing that prevents a human rights tragedy, as well as threatening to cause one.
The right to own guns for hunting has also haunted UN gun trade agreements. Concerns have been voiced about the rights of indigenous communities to uphold their traditions – from the Maoris of New Zealand to the Inuit of Canada – and has been a persistent point of concern.21
The thing, though, is this: these UN treaties did recognise legitimate rights such as self-defence and hunting. The international community could have their cake and eat it. So the question is – why had so many gun-producing countries not signed up to the numerous gun treaties? The answer to this lies, in part, to the existence of a very unique breed of men: the well-funded pro-gun lobby.
Tom waited until I had ordered before he said what he was having. My hunger-sapping sickness had long passed, and yet I hesitated over what to ask for. Either he wanted to see how much I would eat and have less than me, I figured, or he just was not hungry. It’s hard to say when you dine with a pro-gun lobbyist. Power breakfasts are more about power than they are about breakfast, evidently.
In the mid 1990s a global coalition of forty-four pro-gun groups formed to match the disarmament coalitions. They called it the World Forum on Shooting Activities and claimed to represent over 100 million sports shooters around the world, including members of that behemothic American gun lobby group, the National Rifle Association.22
Tom Mason was the World Forum’s lobbyist at the UN. He looked the part – like a man born from the fertile imaginings of Tennessee Williams. A dapper and smooth-jawed lawyer from Portland, Oregon, a state with the strongest of the strong hunting and shooting traditions. He ordered porridge (‘too many calories in granola’) and began talking about how the pro-gun lobby impacted the UN’s Programme of Action – the main measure designed to combat the illicit traffic of arms.
‘A lot of very, shall we say, “liberal” governments – I’m putting quotes around “liberal”, you could use the term “leftist” governments – and some anti-gun forces tried to institute the Programme of Action . . . that effort was curtailed to a great extent by John Bolton.’
John Bolton. The prominent American neo-conservative who once served as the US ambassador to the UN and a man possibly best remembered for two things: the first was the whiteness and the bushiness of his moustache, the second that he was made ambassador to the UN even though he thought that ‘there is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.’23
He certainly brought with him an arrogance of ideology that comes with any superpower. As Tom said, the right to bear arms was there from the beginning: ‘John Bolton said any Programme of Action could not affect civilian firearms.’
In his opening speech at that debate, Bolton laid down a series of what he called ‘red lines’. These were issues the US would not accept in a final document. They included rejecting any attempt to impose restrictions on the legal trade of guns, any limits on the sale of guns and any text that made the Programme of Action legally binding. His ‘red lines’ were so bellicose they caused Camilo Reyes Rodriguez, the Programme of Action’s conference president and the ambassador of Colombia, to roll his eyes. He was disappointed, the ambassador said in his closing speech, that ‘due to the concerns of one state’ the rest of the UN could not agree on controls over private ownership or on preventing the sales of guns to non-state groups.24 Bolton had got his way.
What is he doing now, I wondered? Bolton chairs the National Rifle Association’s international affairs subcommittee. Of course he does.
From that august position Bolton has tried to trip up negotiations on the Arms Trade Treaty. He said, for instance, that the treaty would constrain the freedoms of countries that recognise gun rights, that it would ‘specifically, and most importantly, constrain the United States’.25 It caused Amnesty International to specifically ask the NRA to ‘drop its campaign of distortions’.26 But the damage was done: distortion was pervasive, rumours circulated.
These whispers suggested the treaty was set up by the UN to put a stake in the heart of the Second Ame
ndment;27 that it would lead to the US government creating a registry of gun owners;28 that it was to be signed into law while Congress was not in session.29 None of these was true. Even the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights said it was ‘unlikely the proposed treaty would compromise Second Amendment rights’. If it did, ‘the treaty itself would be void’.30
Perhaps people saw through the lies. The NRA, for once, was unsuccessful at getting what it wanted. The Arms Trade Treaty was passed with an overwhelming majority, and the US itself signed up to it in September 2013.31 But – and this was a big but – it had yet to be ratified by the US Senate. The Wall Street Journal said at the time: ‘If the NRA loses . . . in New York, the organization would probably shift its focus to the Senate to prevent ratification of the pact.’32 It was there, in the Senate, that a two-thirds majority was required for the treaty to be ratified. Certainly the NRA’s Washington lobbyists had already begun their work.
Earlier that year, at three o’clock on a Saturday morning in March, a non-binding amendment was passed in the Senate with a 53–46 vote opposing the Arms Trade Treaty.33 The largest gun producer in the world showed its colours in a pre-dawn vote: they are unlikely ever to ratify the treaty.
Russia was to do likewise. And when you consider that between 2008 and 2011 the US and Russia made almost 70 per cent of all arms transfer agreements to the developing world, this is a concern.34
I asked Tom about Bolton. ‘So, was he coming from a domestic perspective – from the US Second Amendment?’
‘To a great extent, yes,’ said Tom. They call that lobby understatement.
Again I saw the Second Amendment having deep consequences far beyond the US’s borders – not just in the smuggling of arms into Mexico and Central America, but also in the hamstringing of international treaties and its impact on debates on how to limit the harm caused by guns around the world. Because if the world’s biggest gun producer isn’t playing ball, you’ve got a problem.
This was not just by refusing to sign treaties. The NRA has a history of actively getting involved in pro-gun lobbying outside the US. It gave support to those in Ottawa seeking the closure of Canada’s gun registry.35 It gave seminars on public safety – one called ‘Refuse to Be a Victim’ – in Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago.36 And when Brazil, a country with more gun deaths than any other country not at war,37 tried to hold a referendum on a nationwide gun ban the NRA waded in. Lobbyists were sent down. ‘Emphasize rights, not weapons,’ was their mantra. So the Brazilian gun lobby began running adverts saying that if the government takes away your right to own a weapon, they could take away other liberties from you, too.38 Before the campaign, over 70 per cent of Brazilians said they supported the gun ban. By the end of it, 64 per cent of Brazilians voted against it.39
Even Albino in Mozambique had been affected. ‘Once a member of the National Rifle Association came to my office in 2001,’ he said. ‘He came not to destroy the guns, but to ask if we could give them to the NRA.’ It staggered me that someone from the NRA would trek across the world to a country freshly suffering from a million dead and still offer to buy up their remaining guns.
So I asked Tom how he could object to guns being sold to governments with histories of human rights abuse. But Tom was as slippery as he was charming.
‘It’s hard to talk about a fundamental objection to human rights abuses when nobody really has defined what that human rights abuse is,’ he said. ‘It’s a real possibility that some leftist or some anti-gun organisation could go to a government of a country that manufactures and exports firearms and say, “We are objecting to your exports of firearms to the United States because there are human rights abuses in the United States with firearms.’”
One thing was clear. That to understand how the global war on guns has been largely hamstrung, I had to understand how the Second Amendment and guns are lobbied for in the US. And the greatest lobbyists there – certainly the ones with the most influence – were the National Rifle Association.
In 2014, at the NRA’s 143rd annual meeting, the executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, took to the podium. He looked smart in a striped tie and sombre suit, but the warning he gave was filled with fire and brimstone.
Some of the things he talked about were noble and good. He challenged workplace bullying and praised small acts of kindness. He said there were people in America who would walk past an abandoned child in the streets. ‘Not me,’ I thought. And not members of the NRA, said LaPierre.
It made you think the members of the NRA must be good people. After all, as LaPierre said, they get involved in Little League, go to church, obey the law. They don’t ignore orphaned waifs. So what’s not to like? He said, ‘We are the good guys!’ a dozen times.40 And, according to a 2012 Gallup poll, 54 per cent of Americans also thought the NRA were the good guys.41
It’s hard to disagree. In my travels around America, I had met plenty of NRA members who were good, solid folk – sometimes angry, sometimes suspicious, often scared, but overwhelmingly salt-of-the-earth people and charming and funny with it. They had a view of guns neatly summed up in a newspaper comment piece: ‘When owning a gun is not about ludicrous macho fantasy, it is mostly seen as a matter of personal safety, like the airbag in the new Ford pick-up’.42
The audience was filled with men in check shirts with thick-set arms and big moustaches. They nodded and occasionally applauded. LaPierre was preaching to the choir here. But it was not the people who made up the NRA that interested me. Rather it was the agendas and methods employed by their leaders and lobbyists that fascinated. Even more so when they talked about things like personal safety.
At the Leadership Forum, LaPierre’s tone got darker.43 He said Americans were buying more guns and ammo than ever before. Not to cause trouble. No. ‘We already know we are in trouble.’ His words grew ominous.
‘There are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and carjackers and knockout gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all . . . We are on our own . . . The life or death truth is that when you’re on your own, the surest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!’44
It was an apocalyptic vision. One in which he even warned he would be ridiculed for ‘feverish fear mongering’. This was a clever ploy. If you pre-empt criticism as inevitable, you help reduce the power of that criticism. But his words confused me. LaPierre’s rhetoric seemed to run counter to the NRA’s mantra that more guns equals less crime. They themselves ran headlines that read: ‘Gun ownership at all-time high, nation’s murder rate at nearly all-time low’.45 They couldn’t have it both ways, could they? At the same time LaPierre was summoning up the nightmare of pervasive and increasing threat to life, America had never been more heavily armed. So why was he saying this stuff?
His speech was clearly not about logic and joined-up argument. It was about emotion. As Ana Marie Cox wrote in the Guardian, his underlying message was: ‘Give the NRA money. Give us money so we can create the legal environment that allows gun manufacturers to make more money so that they can give us more money.’46
The NRA is certainly not a poor organisation. Nearly half of the NRA’s funding comes from the dues paid by its 5 million members.47 But its big cheques come from the gun industry. Campaigners claim that, since 2005, ‘corporate partners’ have donated as much as $60 million to the NRA.48 Included in this figure are eight gun companies who have ‘given gifts of cash totaling $1,000,000 or more’.49 And you are struck by facts such as the NRA gives each gun industry CEO their very own golden jacket if they hand over a million bucks.50
It is a virtuous circle – or a vicious one, depending on how you look at it – where profits from purchased guns are used to fund lobbying that help secure your rights to purchase more
guns.
And a good deal of lobbying goes on: in 2013 the NRA spent $3.4 million on that dark art.51 The question is, of course, who is pulling the strings here – the manufacturers or the lobbyists? I asked Josh Horowitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence about this, and his response was direct: ‘People always say, “Oh, the industry controls the NRA . . . they give them a lot of money.” They do give them a lot of money, but it’s almost like extortion money: “You will give us this money”, or “You will not innovate for safety . . . to put better trigger locks on. Because if you do, we’re going to boycott you.”’
He had a point. During the Clinton administration, Smith & Wesson committed to help prevent gun sales into the illegal market.52 That decision almost put the company out of business.53 The NRA instigated a boycott, and Smith & Wesson ended up losing 40 per cent of its sales.54
Putting it simply, the NRA has the US gun industry by the balls.
No other gun lobby in the world has this sort of influence. When Nigel Farage of the British UK Independence Party called for handguns to be legalised and licensed in the UK he was met with derision.55 When Germany introduced a firearm registry, the gun lobby response was muted. ‘The German minister of interior promised to guarantee a very high level of security of the data, so for us it’s not a problem,’ said Frank Goepper of Forum Waffenrecht, one of the main gun rights groups there.56 By and large gun lobbyists elsewhere are niche groups. In the US, the NRA is not only the main voice for gun owners, but it has a deep and pervasive influence on America’s gun culture. This influence was touched on by LaPierre in his speech.