pushed open the window and looked down. The pink neon strips of Le Player’s sex lounge shimmied in the lessening dark; the transsexuals, who had pushed their long legs out at the passing men, had left the kerb outside World’s Elite hours before, but the women from the Congo were still there. They knew what work really was and they whistled and plucked at the sleeves of men seeking comfort in the early morning. They were sweet-perfumed and hard-faced.
After Leeds I had come here, to Switzerland, to get my facts straight about how many guns there were in the world. The night before I had read that in 2007 it was estimated that there was about one gun for every seven people in the world; that police forces had about 26 million firearms; armies 200 million;8 and that civilians owned the rest: 650 million.9 These figures came from the Small Arms Survey – a Swiss-based organisation that lay about a mile away from where I was staying and which was my next port of call.
I had a meeting that morning with their chief, Eric Berman. With almost a billion guns out there, his job was to give some semblance of statistical order to them. He was, in a sense, a worldwide oracle on gun facts and figures. Definitely a man to meet. So I dressed and left the hotel, passed the cat-calling women and headed out to Geneva’s waking streets.
The Small Arms Survey was on Avenue Blanc, and the area could not have been more Swiss. The Survey’s office was tucked away in the same building as the Myanmar, Cape Verde and Tanzanian missions. Next door to them was a chocolate shop with an oversized cacao bunny in the window. Beside that stood a business school, a medical centre and the Swiss Audit & Fiduciary Services Company. It all had a sterility and orderliness to it that was a world away from the gore and blood that gun violence brings.
I rang the bell. Eric was called for. As I waited, I browsed the magazines on the waiting-room table: Defence News International, Security Community, Asian Military Review – bitter-edged titles. The same could be said of the photography on the walls. One showed bullet holes in a window overlooking a grimy industrial sprawl in La Vela Gialla, an Italian neighbourhood run by the Camorra mafia family. There was a photo of a drug dealer’s hand in Brooklyn, clutching a Colt Python .357 Magnum along with fifty bucks’ worth of five-dollar crack cocaine wraps. Then an image, black and white like the others, of Liberian youths clutching Kalashnikov-style assault rifles, wearing bandanas. They stared fiercely at the unflinching lens. Guns and their many faces around the world.
Eric appeared, shook my hand and led me to his office. We sat down, and I began to explain that I was writing this book about the world of guns and that . . .
‘You don’t have to butter me up,’ he said, and I was surprised. I thought this was going to be a nice conversation; he looked nice – slim, middle-aged, neat. He reminded me of one of those cautious editors you meet on British papers: clever without eccentricity, focused without shifting into obsessional.
‘The Small Arms Survey has many views on guns,’ he carried on, answering a question I hadn’t asked. ‘We don’t have a single view. My personal reason for doing this is very different from that of my colleagues . . .’ and he began to explain how the Survey is neither pro-armament or anti-gun. Then he stopped, looked at me and said, ‘Ask me a specific question.’
So I did. ‘How many guns are there in the world?’
But you can’t just give a number, he said. Eventually, after telling me how the Survey reviews 193 United Nation member states, and with all the caveats that go with not having access to decent data, he handed me three reports: ‘875 million was the global estimate.’ He then said that number could be higher – this figure was seven years old. He spoke of how secrecy surrounds military and law-enforcement figures, how the Survey has to estimate the number of guns some militaries have by looking at the numbers of soldiers at the height of a nation’s power, because when armies downsize their guns are often just put into storage. Such are the challenges of getting a bigger picture. But he did say one thing was certain: more weapons are produced globally each year than are destroyed.
I asked him if counting the number of guns owned by various militaries could help fuel an arms race between countries.
‘That’s a facile argument,’ he said, a spark of irritation deep in his eyes. I was intrigued by how defensive he was being. I told him so.
‘It’s hard to give you concrete answers,’ he said, crossing his arms.
‘There’s no intrinsic relationship between the quantities of firearms in a given place and the levels of violence,’ he said. ‘One can really skew one’s argument in favour or against gun control. You can pick and choose. You have to be very careful on this topic, as it is so easily manipulated and used. Some people just don’t appreciate the complexity of it.’
He saw me glaring back at him over my notebook, and he breathed out. You just have to be cautious, he told me. ‘Journalists can take a snippet of something you’ve said and use it to move an agenda forward, and I don’t want to get caught up in that.’
As he spoke, I realised this New Yorker, who had a map on the wall of a hitchhiking trail that he’d trodden years before through the Congo and who had lived in Israel and Kenya, Mexico and Cambodia, was not that dissimilar to me. Guns had propelled him around the world, and his view on them was as shifting as the sandy ground of facts he walked upon.
I had hoped to meet a guide – someone who could have showed me an intellectual and factual path in my journey into the world of the gun. But I’d met someone who refused to be rooted in one opinion, choosing instead ever-changing interpretations offered by ever-changing hard numbers. He told me the world of guns had changed him, that he now looks at data differently and he has to be more cautious in the words he uses to describe his Survey’s conclusions. Guns are inherently political, it was clear, and he strived for a consciously impartial voice.
He gradually relaxed and showed me his office. It was filled with softer things: humanity in baubles that had little to do with guns. A paperweight from the Central African Republic, a grave marker from Gabon, a stamp from the Republic of Guinea showing, surreally, Carrot Man from Lost in Space. An unopened bottle of Kazakh vodka rested on the shelf.
‘Make sure you write down that it was unopened.’ And I did, because in the world of guns you have to be careful with the facts, clearly.
After all, it’s a matter of life and death.
II. Pain
2. THE DEAD
The gun’s mountain of dead in hard numbers – Honduras – the most dangerous place on earth – the tragedy of three murdered women in a jaundiced street – a visit to the fire-marked morgue of San Pedro Sula – witnessing a journalist’s trade and a nighttime shooting – the secrets of the embalmers’ art
Guns kill, and in vast numbers, because even though we live in a world of nukes and ground-to-air missiles, chemical warfare and mortar rounds, it’s the gun that does the low-level, high-cost damage.1 The gun is the Top Trump of killers, and the numbers killed by gunfire are bloodily incontestable. While dead men might not talk, they do offer some statistical truths.
Global numbers are hard to come by, but estimates from international studies suggest that between 526,0002 and 600,0003 violent deaths happen annually. UN data on homicides show that in areas of high levels of murders, the vast majority of these are with guns – often over 80 per cent of them.4 An assault with a firearm is about twelve times more likely to kill you than being attacked in other intimate ways, like with a knife,5 so taking into account that
