Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (29 page)

There is the battue, or the beating of sticks, where you drive animals into a gun’s range. You can go calling – the art of mimicking animal noises to lure them to you. There is blind hunting, which involves waiting for animals from a concealed hide. There is stalking, the practice of quietly searching for your prey. Persistence hunting is done by running your prey to exhaustion. And then there is netting, trapping, spotlighting and glassing.

These things I did not know, but I was trying to learn them as I battled with an immense German breakfast of
Aufschnitt und Käse
,
in a functional hotel on the outskirts of the Bavarian town of Nuremberg. In an hour the IWA Outdoor Classics – an international show for hunting guns and a wide range of shooting sports – was opening. Given it was filled with huntsmen, it felt appropriate to fill myself with heavy meat and to learn the secret language of poachers and trackers while so doing.

About 40,000 hunters from over 100 countries had travelled to this town in southern-central Germany, and it was, simply, the best place for a novice like me to be introduced to the worlds of chasers and deerstalkers.

Finishing my plate of sliced sausage, I headed to the subway. Nuremberg’s metro was teutonically punctual and shifted smoothly through this quiet town. The air was brisk and cold, the sky a blank white. Outside, large functional and faceless office buildings sped past. From time to time men in smart suits pulling petite roller briefcases joined the train; they were on the way to the shooting show, too. Gun sellers.

A Frenchman boarded, wearing a light-brown moleskin jacket and fox tie, as if the Revolution had never happened. Behind me two Englishmen with broad faces and even broader Cornish accents talked about profits. The train slid to a stop.

As we stepped out, the sprawling convention centre lay on all sides, up a covered slope. It was a broad cathedral to commerce, struck in minimalist white and glass and steel. Thousands of people were striding with intent, and a pianist played the Roberta Flack classic ‘Killing Me Softly’ inside. Armed with a press-tag lanyard, I walked in.

The first stall was not discreet, despite its attempts to be so. J. P. Sauer & Sohn. Established in 1751, it was clearly a gun manufacturer that wanted you to know where you stood in the order of things. A large and largely empty VIP section was cordoned off behind a line of glass cabinets, in which stood the manufacturers’ history in gunmetal – shotguns from 1899, 1894 and 1885, the earliest a Kal.12 Perkussion-Doppelflinte from 1835. It had an exquisite hunting scene engraved on its stock, and these detailed intricacies spoke of privilege and clear class lines. Yet, for all their implied elitism and advertised good taste, J. P. Sauer & Sohn were still willing to make tat. There stood a
Steampunk rifle, decorated with fanciful flourishes in an attempt to capture a sense of apocalyptic industrialism, sold to a man whom the Sauer rep disdainfully called ‘an Arab buyer’ for €140,000. Beside it lay a bespoke ‘Genghis Khan’ hunting rifle, engraved with mystical symbols from the East, its stock a maze of Chinese exotica. It was mounted on a dais beside a Moorish helmet laid out upon a bed of desert sand. It had the price tag of €108,000 and looked like a Disney nightmare.

It was clear this was a show where money talked, where it could buy you a lesson in prescribed taste or cause the self-same arbiters of etiquette to look the other way. So, if you took your Genghis Khan shooter from its rifle case and signed up to an over-priced safari the people here would, you imagine, follow the lead of one of the advertising flyers and insist you were ‘hunting in elegance’.

I carried on through the high, vaulted space. There were huge stalls, each themed, each drawing your eye with carefully considered marketing allure. Despite the early hour, people were sipping white wine at a Scandinavian bar made of bleached wood, pelts and furs. Opposite them was a tent for the British shotgun manufacturer John Rigby. It was a safari fantasy in zebra skins and wicker chairs. Even its whisky spoke of a rugged past: Monkey Shoulder – a nickname given to the lopsided look that maltmen once got after endlessly turning the barley by hand.

Then an enormous wolfdog, a 30-kilogram monster with amber eyes and a high-set tail, walked past. A beast that came out of a 1950s programme that sought to merge German sheepdogs and Carpathian wolves, it had been bred as an attack dog for the Czechoslovak special forces. It turned and stuck its muzzle into my crotch. I gently pushed it away, and it followed me until I darted behind a screen to come face to face with a woman in a white shirt and a high-waisted black skirt tapping meticulously on a long barrel fixed firmly in a vice. Her movements were steady and sure, and I stood momentarily enamored of the delicate skill of her art. She was marking an elaborate design into the metal upper housing of a shotgun. Small circles showed upon metal and were expanding under her guiding hands into a subtle rococo flourish.

Her name was Lieben. She was in her mid thirties and had been an engraver for thirteen years now, her role one of the chief engravers for the Belgium arm of the shotgun manufacturer Browning. She was based in Liège, the centuries-old home to gunsmiths, and worked in a unit custom making about 100 bespoke rifles a year. She could tap like this for hours, she said, taking her craft seriously and slowly. One day she might like to do knives or jewellery, but for the moment she was content with beautifying firearms. Lieben found this gunmetal work meditative, her attention to detail part of a tradition that spanned back to medieval Walloon artisans.

‘Let Our Craftsmen Create The Gun Of Your Dreams,’ said a Browning advert on her right. Twelve workers could take up to a year to produce bespoke guns like these – the engraving alone on a rifle takes 500 hours.

The head of sales for the custom shop walked up. His name was Lionel Neuville, a youngish man with a filled-out face and a high forehead. He was clearly in love with the artistry of the weapons here. When he was a child his mother once took him around the grand museums of Europe. Now, though, she’s mystified at his hunting lifestyle, hating the idea her son sells such instruments of death. But it seemed to me it was more the allure of beauty in the gun, not blood, that had inspired Neuville’s enthusiasm.

‘I’m not really here to sell guns, more to show the quality, the feeling of the gun – what is possible,’ he said. ‘Our customers are mainly self-made men and are really into stunning things: guns, cars. They want a “wow” item to show to their friends, and we are that: the Aston Martin of the gun.’

His usual client is a rich man in his mid fifties who has been hunting for a while. He invites them over to Belgium to view the factory; they are chauffeured from the airport and given a €500 luxurious French meal to seal the deal. He pats his stomach, and you can see he’s sealed a few of them. One thing that he does not do, though, is discuss the price with the client. That would be gauche.

Of course not all customers want the same thing. He can’t sell gold-plated pistols in France – ‘It’s a bit “bling-bling”’ – but the Germans or Americans buy such things happily.

‘The French and the English may not like each other, but they are similar in that they know what they like – even down to the colour of the wood,’ he said. ‘The French want a yellowish wood, the British a dark red.’ Such bespoke taste does not come cheap. The double-barrelled shotguns he sells run into the upper tens of thousands of euros. But for many of the buyers, price is never the issue.

‘The Russians have the money, but they want to buy a piece of history,’ he said. ‘They like to buy the Side-by-Side because this was what the Tsar had.’ A shotgun made for Tsar Nicholas II recently sold in auction for a record $287,500, so it was clear the Russians were prepared to dig deep for the right image.
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‘They want people to see their guns, but they will be discreet about it. It’s not “take a look at my new gun”, but they leave it purposefully at the entrance to the house. It starts a new conversation.’

Of course, there is a long, deep history of European hunting with guns. The Lithuanian, Finnish, Czech and Polish national hunting associations all recently celebrated ninety years since their founding, while the granddaddy of the Union of Hunters and Anglers in Bulgaria had its 115th birthday in 2013.
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By and large, European hunting is incredibly popular. Today there are about 7 million European hunters.
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Finland, for instance, has the third-highest rate of firearm ownership in the world, and over half of its firearm permits are for hunting.
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There are an estimated 1.3 million hunters in France, and 980,000 in Spain, while the island state of Malta has the highest hunter density of anywhere in Europe – possibly the world – with fifty hunters per square kilometre.
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It is even more extreme, as many things tend to be, in the US. There, pro-hunting groups claim almost 14 million Americans hunt every year (some say as many as 43 million Americans hunt, but that seems to be overstating things);
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58 per cent of all those who carry guns reportedly do so for hunting;
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and there are over 10,000 clubs and organisations across the US dedicated just to hunting, such as the Safari Club International, the National Wild Turkey Federation and Ducks Unlimited.
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Not surprisingly, it’s big business and always, in a sense, has been. In the early days of the American frontier the hide of a deer was
worth a dollar – which is how the term ‘buck’ for a one-dollar bill came about.
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Today, American hunters are said to spend 38.3 billion bucks on their passion, more than – the hunting lobby claims at least
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– the revenue of Google.
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Hunting supports an estimated 680,000 jobs: the $26.4 billion in salaries and wages being larger than the entire economy of Vermont.
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And it’s reportedly growing: between 2006 and 2011, the number of hunters was said to have increased by 9 per cent.
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Of course, with this much money and enjoyment at stake, the US has a very strong political voice that shouts loud about the benefits of hunting and the right to bear arms. They argue it is safe and humane, environmentally sound and economically beneficial. Some disagree, clearly. According to the International Hunter Education Association’s own historical data, over 1,000 people in the US and Canada are accidentally shot by hunters a year, with about eighty of those accidents being fatalities. Hardly safe.
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Amid Nuremberg’s artisanal beauty, though, you could hardly envisage danger and death. Here was luxury and life. The sections spun off into different gun genres. Some focused on selling decoys and targets of ducks and geese; others sold high-quality ear protection; some just made their living by selling gun-care oil. There were multi-pull clay pigeon systems for training, or shooting-range ventilation manufacturers (yours for €30,000). A Scottish-based gunbox manufacturer from New Zealand would make you an elaborate storage system in walnut for €8,000. There were optic sights and gutting knives, thick stalking boots and wrap-around sunglasses. Everywhere was a microcosm of economic supply and demand – accessories for weapon and hunter alike.

Robin Deas, an old-school Brit, summed this up. He showed me how he had built a flourishing business by focusing on a very specific aspect of gun-hunting culture: namely, feet. At seventy-three, he runs the House of Cheviot and sells knee-high, luxury stalking socks to the hunting classes: merino wool reared in Australia, spun in Italy and knitted in Hawick on the Scottish borders. And he told me, in a crisp English accent, that these socks, in the colour of cinnamon and moss and bilberry, sell for as much as £300 a pair.

‘To presidents and kings, sultans and queens,’ he said with a smile. I was sure most of them wouldn’t want the world to know their socks cost close to their subjects’ living weekly wage, but it was testimony to the rich micro-climate of the hunting economy.
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I wandered on: into a world of skull mounts designed for bleached trophies from East Africa; enormous bronze sculptures of stalking leopards; Slovakian hunting furniture built in an explosion of jutting wood and wrought iron; and Italian stands selling delicate silver trinkets of pheasant and fox. It was a marathon just to wander the endless aisles.

Slowly, a feeling of claustrophobia began to grip. The entire place was so focused on hard selling and slick marketing that the romance and open space promised by the hunt diminished and died. Here was a good place to see merchandise: luxury, bespoke and of the highest quality. It was also a good place to be an anthropologist studying Europe’s landed elites. But it was not a good place to understand the motivation of the rifle hunter.

Loaded down with brochures and name cards, I walked wearily back to the metro. But my stalking had paid off; I had caught what I set out to get: an introduction.

The office was in a run-down street in a run-down part of my home city. I walked past a fly-poster-daubed corner shop, continued opposite a washed-out council estate, then, skirting a line of under-the-arches businesses offering cheap MOTs, came to a bleak south London side road.