the wounded-hero fantasy I had of him was transformed, because it was clear this man of intelligence and humility, despite showing no hatred for Islam or the Saudis, can never forget what those bullets took from him. Like playing with his children on a beach. Or skiing without a second thought. Or just walking. I wanted to ask him if he could still make love. But I did not, because he was a gentleman, and I felt ashamed at wanting to know these things. He did, though, talk about feelings; he had lived through some grim moments, particularly in hospital.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t say that anything good has come out of it. That would be too much.’
A shadow passed across his face.
It is easy to forget the psychological injuries sustained through gun violence, I thought. We often just associate guns with physical harm, but it is clear that’s simply not the case. In one study, sixty gunshot patients admitted to a trauma centre were interviewed when at hospital, and interviewed again eight months after they were discharged. Over 80 per cent reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Other studies support these findings, showing that gun-trauma patients have twice the odds of suffering PTSD than motor vehicle accident survivors.39
Frank had managed to find some semblance of balance again. He had the support of a major institution like the BBC, a loving family, an enviable job and a sharp mind. But he also had pain, legs that did not work, and all the secret humiliations this must bring. And his eyes were marked with it.
Perhaps that was what I took from meeting Frank. Not that being wounded by a gun brings pain; that is, perhaps, too obvious. Not that the strength of a man’s character is based on whether he can turn a gunshot tragedy into triumph, because Frank saw no silver lining to what had happened. Rather, that the gun has no moral function. It does not question your worth, or your kindness, or your intelligence. It just does what it does, and that is to wound and to scar in ways that we will never truly know unless somebody shoots us – or we shoot ourselves.
4. THE SUICIDAL
The gun’s bitter role in suicide – a filmed moment of despair – a dark pilgrimage to the scene of a tragedy in New York, USA – talking to an American psychologist and learning from Sylvia Plath – Switzerland – meeting a suicide charity by the shores of Lake Geneva – and an unexpected discovery
According to the World Health Organization, over 800,000 die every year from suicide, in all of its despairing forms.1 This works out at about one person taking their life every forty seconds. What it means is that more people kill themselves each year than are killed by homicides and wars combined, and suicide is one of the leading causes of death among teenagers and adults under thirty-five.2
Of this mountain of dead, firearm suicides account for a huge number. Exact figures are hard to come by, but the general observation is that where guns are very common you often find a higher level of suicide deaths by that method. None more so than in the US, where more people shoot themselves than anywhere else in the world – 60 per cent of all suicides are by this method.3 It works out, on average, at about fifty gun suicides every day.4
Of course, there is no such thing as one ‘America’ when it comes to statistics; there are major regional differences. Alaska has a firearm suicide rate 700 per cent higher than New Jersey.5 But what we do know is that shooting yourself is becoming much more common there. The percentage of US gun suicides has increased from about 35 per cent of all suicides in the 1920s to over half today.6 And what shocks are the quiet lines in the US data. Like the cold figures that record there were ninety-two children under the age of fourteen who shot themselves in 2011.7
Comparing such figures to other developed nations highlights what an unaddressed problem the US has. In England and Wales gun suicides account for less than 2 per cent of all suicides.8 In Latin America and the Caribbean only 13 per cent of the 26,213 suicides in 2012 were with guns.9
Given the high level of firearm ownership there, this observation of the US as a gun suicide outlier is in line with the oft-stated link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides.10 In fact, so strong is this link that one way the Small Arms Survey establish levels of gun ownership in a country ‘is the proportion of suicides committed with firearms’.11 So it is no surprise that the US has a firearm-suicide rate almost six times higher than most developed nations.12
This was why, some months before I went to South Africa and on my way back from Honduras, I had stopped over in New York. There I had travelled deep into the heart of the city to visit a place that had stayed with me ever since I had begun researching the gun’s role in suicides: 1358 Washington Avenue.
The east coast wind pushed down the wide street, and clumps of fallen leaves danced in tight circles. Distant police sirens coughed out ugly staccatos across the city, and the winter sun bleached its low-covering sky. I parked my cheap rental car behind a scuffed brown Ford, a Dominican flag limply displayed in its stained rear window, and opened the door.
In front of me was a twenty-storey high, dull brown-brick tower. Bland and architecturally functional, this was one of the Projects, built in the mid 1960s to house some of the poor and the huddled masses of the greatest nation on earth. It was named after Governor Morris, a founding father by whose hand the American Constitution was written. And it was one of ten similar blocks, housing over 3,000 people, here in the Bronx. It was not the nice side of town.
Autumn had reached these streets weeks before, and the rough grass outside the building lay coated with curling leaves. A sweatshirt and a pair of tights draped the sparse limbs of skeletal trees and flapped in the wind like flags of poverty. Coffee cups scuttled around on gritty gusts, and squirrels darted up and down the encrusted bark of the trees.
Ten years ago, Paris Lane, a troubled twenty-two-year-old, had killed himself here in the foyer of this block. Paris had imagined himself alone, but a NYPD surveillance camera was the unblinking eye that saw him talking to – and, it was later to be said, being rejected by – his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Krystin Simmons. It captured the wiping of tears from eyes and her hugging the young man with his lank hair braids and his black, dull puffer jacket.
And it saw what happened next.
Krystin walked into the lift and the metal doors closed. Paris then, with a casualness that belied what happened next, put a balled hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a handgun. He put the pistol in his mouth.
A life was extinguished, and the CCTV camera carried on filming.
It would have ended there, but that grainy video was to find its way onto a website called Liveleak.com, one that specialises in videos of people dying, often killing themselves. Liveleak has videos of people jumping off buildings or stepping before trains. It has a few videos of men, and it is only men, even pulling the trigger. They had posted this particular film under the line ‘An Oldie but a Goodie’. So it was that over half a million people watched the ending of this man’s life, and I was one of them.
The watching of a suicide played out on video is a terrible and compelling thing. You see the sudden jerk of death as the bullet rips life away, then you rewind to the point of the last breath and you pause right at that moment when life is extinguished.
These things leave digital ghosts in our mind, the grandest and most terrible of gestures. And Paris’s death had haunted.
I
