We followed the body out into the light and slipped back into our car. Then, after waiting for the coroner’s van to slide away, we too pulled out and drove south, following an unhurried squad car back to the city’s police headquarters. And none of us spoke.
The building was low-slung and squat, built in the way Brazilian architects love: concrete, slats and shutters. Municipal chic that was made markedly less chic and more threatening by the armed police stood behind its long glass front. The steps leading up to it were broad and shallow; they twisted in an arc and made the walk to the doors of justice a slow one.
An image of São Paulo as a dystopian city, something out of a Judge Dredd comic, came to mind. This was its rigid heart of order and legal retribution, but policemen stood, their arms cradling dull metallic weapons. The reason for this was clear. In one year alone there were over a thousand gun murders in this city, in waves of crime so violent they had caused schools to close and municipal bus routes to change.1
It was small wonder that this governmental building was so foreboding. Dozens of police officers had been killed, caught up in the endless drug wars that blighted this land. The guards at the entrance were taking no chances. They were heavily armed – police assault rifles slung across their riot shoulder pads and bulletproof vests lying underneath.
Passing through scanners and scrutiny, we emerged on the other side. There we were met by Colonel Luiz de Castro. A short man with dark, tightly cut hair, a firm jaw and a precisely ironed shirt, he looked like someone born to be in the service of the state. Greeting us with an iron handshake, he was quick to address why we had come here: to see São Paulo’s seized-gun repository.
‘A few years ago we had a gun amnesty,’ he said as if delivering an order, his voice a staccato drumbeat. ‘Here we have about 20,000 weapons confiscated or handed in. We offer between $50 and $100 for each one.’
The colonel spun on a heel and led us at pace down a long corridor, lit by naked and glaring fluorescent strips. The sandpaper walls here were bare and the floor scuffed, and as we descended slowly into the sodium-coloured belly of this bureaucratic beast, the colonel walked ahead, his boots sounding the mark of his passage. Then he stopped at a grey door and motioned us inside. Beyond lay a small room with a few computer terminals, in front of which sat uniformed officers. They were inputting data and looked up at us with the eyes of people whose lives were spent in rooms without sunlight. Across from them lay a caged door.
The colonel called out, and a shadowed face appeared; keys were turned, and the door swung outwards. We walked into the semi-darkness.
Beyond lay thousands of guns. Every surface was filled with them – the walls lined with wooden, narrow boxes, like a mail-sorting office, each pigeonhole containing a gun with a small paper label attached. Space here had run out long ago, and the guns spilled out onto the counters and the wooden chairs that spread across the floor. A door led on to another room and then another, and the scene was the same in each.
There were semi-automatics from North America; hunting rifles from China; a 9mm pistol from Germany; an old blunderbuss from England. There were home-made handguns and high-tech machine-guns. Black guns so corroded with time you imagined them wielded by slave owners in long-shut-down plantations. There were even some with Polícia stamped on them, because when Brazilian gangs kill a policeman the prize is that downed cop’s sidearm as well as his life.2
Then it struck me how, like the clichéd six degrees of separation, this graveyard of guns was somehow more significant than just what was visible in this narrow space. Each gun here, either through maker or victim, shooter or seller, was somehow linked to a bigger story – each connected to the outside world in a deeper, more nebulous way.
Here were revolvers bought with taxpayers’ money and ordnance left over from long-forgotten wars. Police pistols and army handguns, sports rifles and hunting shotguns from all over the world, many of them tainted with the stain of murderous deeds. The microcosm of life – of law and protection, violence and vengeance, leisure and provision – was laid out in these shadows.
In a sense this lair of guns was a symbolic image for all of the human rights tragedies I had ever been trying to explain as an investigative journalist and a human rights researcher. And the idea for this book was conceived in that moment – a desire to trace the gun’s pathway from its metallic cradle to its blood-tinged grave. A journey to discover the lifecycle of the gun and, in so doing, to understand a little bit more about death and maybe, even, a little about life.
There are almost a billion guns in the world – more than ever before. An estimated twelve billion bullets are produced every year. Over a hundred countries have their own gun industries, and twenty nations recently saw children carrying guns into conflicts. In this new millennium, AK47 rifles have even been sold for as little as $50.3
These are hard facts that have harder consequences. And yet, despite how shocking these numbers are to hear, before I began to research the world of the gun, these were facts I did not know. Perhaps this is because the gun remains all too often forgotten in our media and news. Throughout my career I had frequently reported on the harm wrought by firearms, but I had never actually done a report on the gun itself. It was a bit like the face of evil: you knew it was there, but you felt a little foolish mentioning it. With other weapons, it was different. ‘A kitchen knife? He was beheaded? My God, that’s terrible.’ But with a gun it was more like: ‘Of course there’s a gun.’ Guns were just there, remarkable but unremarked upon.
In Lucicleide’s shaded bedroom, I had seen one face of the gun: the way it can take a life. In São Paulo’s police headquarters, I had seen another: the way the police seek to contain and control guns. But these were isolated images, scattered pieces. Seeing them on their own did not answer questions such as: Who made those guns? How did those police pistols end up being used in a killing? Who profited from the sales of those Uzis?
I knew some of the answers. The assignments and campaigns I had worked on had been diverse enough to allow this. War correspondents usually just witness the harm that guns cause. Arms-trade campaigners often focus on the world of immoral governments. Investigative journalists seek to expose corrupt gun sellers. I had earned a living carrying out all of these roles, and so had seen glimpses of such things and more. Reporting on trafficked women in eastern India or filming the slums of Buenos Aires, seeing the impact of violence in the borderlands of Mexico or recording the tense diplomatic stand-offs between China and Taiwan, I’d seen the gun in many of its varied colours. But there were gaps. I knew little about the world of hunters. I had never met a sniper. Never been inside a gun factory. What I wanted was to bring these parts together – to see the whole, the gun as a sum of its many parts.
Of course, such an undertaking was ambitious. People would suck in their breath when I told them what I wanted to do. Certainly it was global. Too much of the media has fixated on the US’s relationship with guns and that alone, but I wanted to take in the wider view. Guns in the US showed, to me, just the tip of a bloody iceberg.
This was, then, a journey born from both memory and new experiences, one where I had to revisit worn notebooks as well as tread the carpets of soul-sucking airports on my way to yet another killing. And through doing so I sought to weave a complete tapestry of the impact of guns on our world – where the thread of a moment lived in one city might unexpectedly find itself tied to a visit planned in another, far away.
The view I sought was certainly too big to take in without some sort of plan, so I decided to divide my research into the communities the gun impacted. There were those directly harmed by firearms – the dead, the wounded, the suicidal; those who used guns to exert a form of power – murderers and criminals, police and armed forces; the people who used these weapons for pleasure – hobbyists and hunters; and those who sought to profit from their sale – traders, smugglers, lobbyists and, ultimately, the manufacturers. I planned to