Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (33 page)

In 2006, psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg carried out an experiment on thirty male college students. They each provided a saliva sample and then were given a gun or a child’s toy to play with for fifteen minutes. Afterwards another sample of their saliva was taken. The men were then asked to add as much hot sauce as they wanted to a cup of water they thought another subject was going to drink. Those who had been given the gun showed significantly greater increases in testosterone and added much more hot sauce to the water than those who had played with the toy.
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In this experiment the gun seemed transformative. Other studies have shown similar results. Carrying a concealed gun has even been said to change the way people are seen to walk.
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Of course, such experiments need to be replicated a dozen times to prove anything. But I can say this: I have seen policemen and soldiers, self-defence trainers and criminal gangbangers visibly change when they picked up a gun. I have watched the way their guns became part of them, the barrel an extension of their bodies and wills, emboldening them and diminishing the rest of us who did not have guns. The gun transformed these men and the entire situation with it, just as it changed the eyes of the thief who sat opposite me in the heat of that São Paolo summer.

Afterwards, as we sat in the crew car and drove away from the dusty favela, our translator told us she had been terrified. The gang member had spoken words that oscillated between paranoia and anger, and she had struggled to comprehend some of the things he was saying. And she had feared the small pistol in the hands of this angry man.

But this is what happens. A gun gives that ultimate edge of authority to someone who lacks it through intelligence alone. On its own the gun wins any argument – it elevates ‘A Nobody’ to ‘The Man’. Small wonder so many men love them.

As with so many love affairs, things quickly go sour. So it is with man’s love for the gun – a love affair infused with death.

With the exception of New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Tonga and Latvia, more men are killed as a result of armed violence than women. Globally, the male homicide rate is almost four times that of females.
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And in places such as Brazil the vast majority of homicide victims, over 90 per cent, are men – usually poor and young ones.
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For every woman killed by armed violence, the World Health Organization has reported that thirteen men are killed in Colombia, fifteen in El Salvador, sixteen in the Philippines and almost seventeen in Venezuela.
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In war, men fare similarly badly. A major analysis of global mortality data found that the male deaths in war always outstrip female deaths. Also, the females with the highest death rates are baby girls; in males it’s those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine who are hardest hit. This is because women are often impacted by the indirect consequences of war – disease and malnutrition. Men are impacted directly by gunfire – herds of young men going to their death.
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As I had found out from the World Health Organization, men also commit suicide more often than women. The extra-governmental agency looked into gun suicides and found that in every country
they reviewed men had killed themselves with greater frequency than women.
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Yet these terrible and sad figures about the impact of guns on men are often not debated with any conviction. It’s almost as if we feel this is all inevitable, as if men somehow deserve their painful and lonely deaths at the hand of a gun.

Google the exact phrase ‘Armed violence against women’ and you get 26,900 responses. Google ‘Armed violence against men’ and you’ll get two hits.
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Of course, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of gun violence, but this turning away from the true impact of gun violence on men has consequences that are deep and troubling.

For years, a spectre hung over Ciudad Juárez. In the 1990s, this northern Mexican border town became known for its gruesome femicides – the deaths of hundreds of women. These murders, often sexual in nature, grew in the public’s imagination – referenced in Tori Amos’s song ‘Juárez’, Roberto Bolaño’s novel
2666
and FX’s drama
The Bridge
. The city became synonymous with the rape and murder of young girls; pink crosses sprouting around its barren edges, each commemorating the bodies of women found in that grey Mexican dirt.

But as these female tragedies were unfolding in Juárez, far greater numbers of men were also being killed and mutilated. Between 2007 and 2012, over 11,400 people were murdered here. Despite having only 1 per cent of the Mexican population, this border town had about 9 per cent of Mexico’s homicides. By 2010, ten people a day were being gunned down. That year over 3,500 people died, and Juárez earned the title of the most violent city in the world outside a war zone.
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And the vast majority of these dead were men. But few crosses were raised for them.
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In fact, when you really look at the figures you’ll be surprised. The
proportion
of women as victims of all homicides in Juárez was less than it is in many US cities. Female murder victims in Juárez between 1987 and 2007 worked out at less than 10 per cent of all killings there. In US cities such as Houston up to 20 per cent of those murdered in a given year are women.
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And where women were murdered in Juárez, about three-quarters were
the victims of terrible domestic violence – so the cases were essentially solved. Indeed, in those years, only about 100 of the murders of women there were of the type immortalised in film and print.
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Molly Molloy, a researcher into the drug violence that has plagued Mexico, pointed out in an interview with the
Texas Observer
: ‘I’ve read things by some feminist scholars talking about the “harvest” of young, nubile women. I mean, the terminology becomes kind of sensual, or sexual. Some of the writing about these cases I find to be pushing over into the extreme and eroticizing the victims in a way that makes them appear a lot more helpless and powerless than women in Juárez are.’
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Her concern was that the murdered females of Juárez, in a place where about ten times as many men are killed as women, have somehow been overly focused on – to the point of being fetishised. Saying these hard truths does not diminish the fact that each and every death suffered by women there was terrible. But these truths should be said, because every single victim of gun violence matters, regardless of gender.

So why does it seem somehow, then, that men’s deaths in Juárez are given less importance, less media focus, even less sympathy? It’s as if we assume any man killed by a gun in Mexico somehow deserved it more than a woman. But assuming all men murdered there were narcos or gang members is ludicrous. There are the countless young Mexican men pulled off street corners to work as
halcones
(watchers), their lives snuffed out just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something they shouldn’t have. Certainly as many of these ‘innocent’ men were killed in Juárez as women were. Focusing on the bodies of women as the victims in the bitter landscape of Juárez’s violence serves only to address a small part of the overriding problem. As Molly said: ‘If you look at the problem of violence in Juárez as essentially being a problem of young women being murdered, and that if you can solve those murders, then everything will be OK, it feels safer. It feels like you can accomplish something, because then you don’t actually have to look at the real problems of the city.’

Ignore the killings of men, though, and you risk not finding any real way to address the violence committed by them and against
them. You risk the malady of eternal violent repetition. And not just in Juárez – it is all over.

And yet . . . and yet. The answer to reducing gun harm is not as simple as just denying men access to them. After all, guns can be used as much in the preservation of life as in the taking of them. And the male urge to protect is, as I had seen on a trip to Asia, a very primal one.

I was to meet someone recommended to me. A true Pakistani gun enthusiast, I had been told. A man you have to meet – someone who has so, so many guns to protect himself and his family. Why, I had asked. Because the Pakistani state can’t protect them. So I called, and he said, ‘Yes. Come over.’

This was off the cuff. I was in Lahore mainly to talk about the levels of terrorist violence that had impacted this country of 180 million. There were rounds of press interviews and launches to attend on a campaign that my charity was running, seeking to highlight the plight of victims from the rising tide of suicide bombings. But being here, in a country so beset with murder and death, and one infused with machismo and paternalism, I felt compelled to speak to a man who owned guns, because the idea of armed self-defence in a nation where the need for it was so stark intrigued me.

Modern assault rifles and handguns had long ago come into vogue among middle-class male Pakistanis. They bought them because they had lost faith in the ability of the country’s civilian government to protect them. They had seen the assassinations of its popular political leaders, a spreading Islamist insurgency and daily terrorist explosions, and so they prepared themselves for the worst. But more than this, Pakistanis feared the hidden threat of violent kidnapping, extortion and robbery. The murder rate here was 53 per cent higher than in the US.
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And the man I had agreed to meet was more exposed than most: he was a Christian, a father and a journalist, all of which brought with them their own challenges.

So, long after dusk had fallen and with the headlights of my car piercing the corners of a crowded suburb of Lahore, I travelled with a local guide to meet Mr Asher John, the chief news editor of
Pakistan Today
. The mad rush of Lahore’s busier streets, with its ramshackle shops and pulsing electric lights, gradually eased off, and we entered a quieter section of shaded corners and suburban calm. Security guards, wrapped in thick shawls to keep out the night chill, stared from the gloom. Then the car beams picked out the nameplate on his home: John’s Lodge. After a beeped horn, he came outside.

In his mid thirties, Asher was trim and balding and wore a neat moustache. He looked like a typical father, with his jeans, checked shirt and sandals, and he ushered me into his modest home with the mild insistence that comes with Pakistani hospitality. There, underneath a mounted display of a deer’s head, he offered me a Coke and sat and waited for me to ask him a question.

I began by wondering why he had developed such a reputation as a man who knew his guns.

‘If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun,’ he answered, in the peripheral way that many Pakistanis do. The low light caused by weak electrical power, one that marks the nights of this region, gave the conversation a conspiratorial edge.

‘Gun violence in Pakistan is pretty common, you can get shot in the rural areas, you can get shot on the roads. In Pakistan, we’re used to seeing people getting shot, and we’ve ceased really caring about it. Beheadings are something not common: that makes news. People getting shot is everyday.’

He had more to fear than most, though. At thirty-six, he had been a journalist for thirteen years, and his beat was a dangerous one. He mainly reported on blasphemy cases, especially where guns were used in attacks on minorities, including Christians like him.

‘There was one time, five months ago, I was being followed from my work,’ he said. ‘We were trying to investigate a Muslim cleric who was raping young boys at a seminary, and these thugs came after us. They said we made the story all up. It was easier for them to say we are trying to malign the cleric, to call us blasphemers, even
though we had eight or nine children on record. I had to fire two shots to scare those people away.’

The lights from outside flared over the high brick walls, and the grilled windows cast prison-bar shadows on the ceiling. I tried to imagine – from a man’s perspective – what it must be like to live with your family in this way, as if there was nothing solid underneath to guarantee their protection. I guess, for him, guns were the base that he stood on, the thing that made him the protector that he wanted to be.