Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (44 page)

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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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It caused Amnesty International to specifically ask the NRA to ‘drop its campaign of distortions’.
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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 Amendment;
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that it would lead to the US government creating a registry of gun owners;
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that it was to be signed into law while Congress was not in session.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It gave seminars on public safety – one called ‘Refuse to Be a Victim’ – in Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago.
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And when Brazil, a country with more gun deaths than any other country not at war,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And, according to a 2012 Gallup poll, 54 per cent of Americans also thought the NRA were the good guys.
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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’.
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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.
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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!’
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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’.
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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.’
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