To begin, though, I wanted to understand a little bit more about firearms themselves – to see their historic place in the world, how they evolved and how they have influenced the unfolding of history. So I arranged to travel northwards from my home in London, to the largest museum collection of guns in the world – to the Royal Armouries in the English town of Leeds.
The gun collection at the British National Firearms Centre started almost four hundred years ago. It was originally dreamed up by King Charles I, a hapless monarch who wanted to give some uniformity to his kingdom’s procurement of arms. Since then, the centuries have added to the collection; today the armoury boasts the largest number of unique rifles and handguns kept anywhere under one roof. If there was one place to begin a deeper understanding of the world of the gun, this was surely it.
So, on a blustery day in spring, the senior curator there, Mark Murray-Flutter, agreed to meet me at the entrance of the public museum. A large and effusive man, he greeted me in a flurry of great strides and smiles. He held out his left hand to shake me by my right and it confused me; I looked down. Instead of flesh I saw a prosthetic limb. Ex-military, I thought: the price a man pays for being too close to guns. He ignored the look on my face.
Without explaining where we were going, Mark turned and led me away from the municipal grey building at a brisk place, his tie fluttering. We walked down a wind-filled road under heavy, tea-coloured clouds and there, through an unnamed and unmarked door, we crossed into a windowless space lined with steel and concrete. Beyond was a metal detector and an armed guard asking, through a bulletproof window, if he could see my passport. Then there was a body search. Finally, we entered a cavernous space where the public rarely goes.
‘Here you are,’ Mark said, a smile widening on his face. ‘Where it all is.’
Guns. Thousands of them. They filled the cavernous room like squat metal insects, sleeping before an ugly dawn – hunched, silent and demonic. Under the chrome light you could see row after row of every type of firearm imaginable. There they were, oiled and fierce on the floor. There, neat and polished on racks. Hung on wall brackets, put away on shelves, slid deep into recessed drawers. It was like Borges’s infamous library, but here were guns not books – over 14,000 in steel and wood and brass.4 And here, unlike the police repository in Brazil, the guns were ordered and neat – their potential anarchy contained.
It smelled like history: gun oil and the ghosts of cordite. These weapons spoke of past wars and long-forgotten conflicts, because the curators had tried to get their hands on every type of gun ever produced, within reason. When the British used to mass-produce rifles they would dispatch the prototype – the first edition – to the armouries. There they were stamped with a thick layer of copyright sealing wax and stored away. Elsewhere machines got to work and churned out copies in their millions, and the prototype’s offspring wound their way to the foothills of the Himalayas and the steaming jungles of Africa, as this little nation of shopkeepers traded and slaughtered its way into Empire.
The origins of all of that violent shame and bloodied history could be seen here; and this was just the collection of Britain’s guns. There were others, too. Here was the United Nations of firearms – it was almost a case of naming a country and a gun from there could be conjured up.
‘The best way to think about this place is as a library, but instead of having books you have guns,’ Mark said, offering me a cup of tea. A reasonable, softly spoken man, he was not into weapons, he explained. At least not for what they were per se; rather this wounded scholar liked what they represented. He was a social historian, fascinated by how firearms fitted into society. If he had one interest, it was their ornamentation, their decorative appeal. In this way he saw himself as a benign curator – not a man who would view this room in terms of gun control, how many lives taken, how many liberties defended. Rather, he was interested in their meaning.
‘I’m fascinated by the use of firearms as a status symbol, as diplomatic gifts, as love tokens,’ he said, education in his voice. ‘How they can show people you have arrived. Certainly this is true in the world of those who own shotguns – the higher you go up that economic ladder, the less it’s about the cost, the more it’s about the ostentatiousness of the design. The Russian oligarchs, the Mexican drug gangs who gold-plate their guns, they are trying to show that they are all-powerful.’
We spoke about facts. But, in a way, when it came to Mark giving a broad introduction to guns, there was not that much to say. In this world the devil was in the detail. What calibre, what model, these were finer points that many gun enthusiasts fixate on – but not ones that captured my attention. I couldn’t get excited about the small tweaks made to a handgun to sell a newer, deadlier version. I was more interested in what these guns did.
Just as well, really, because when it came to the basic physics of the firearm, Mark said things hadn’t really changed since the fourteenth century. All a gun needs, he explained, is a barrel, a missile, a means of projection, a form of ignition and a way to point it. All the developments since these principles were first conceived were pretty much just perfecting this process.
‘They may be lighter, more compact, but they are fundamentally the same,’ he said, leaning forward over his mug. ‘There have been two major step changes in the development of firearms. The development of the self-contained cartridge in the early nineteenth century and the gun that can fire automatically – developed by the British – by Maxim.’ Perhaps this is what lies beneath the enduring popularity of guns, I thought. The fact that there’s an alluring simplicity to how they work.5
Finishing his tea, Mark rose from the table and told me to follow. He handed over a pair of white gloves, and then, like vicious mime artists, we entered the stacks. There he began to pass me rifle after rifle, with a disconcerting casualness.
Closest to us was a Gardner gun – a five-barrelled, hand-operated machine-gun, fed from a vertical magazine. As the crank turned, he explained, a bullet was loaded into the breech, the bolt closed, and the gun fired.6 It was part of a major landmark in the development of the gun. There were even men who saw civilisation’s face in this mechanised operation purely because the Gardner gun worked on the principle of serialisation. As such the machine-gun was seen, by some, as a product of a rational culture. By default, cultures that could not create such a killing weapon were deemed less civilised, and so open to imperial rule.
Such men would have been impressed here, because in this fortified chamber the walls were lined with sub-machine-guns. Anti-aircraft guns, first designed to combat the use of observation balloons in the American Civil War, also stood to the far left. To the right there were Chinese DShKs; a gun mounted on wheels, called, affectionately, ‘Sweetie’. These stood beside a low line of recoilless rifles once used as tank busters. And there, on the end, were Russian rifles that fired underwater. Civilisation’s progress laid out in deadly metal.
These guns all told a story in their own way. They spoke of how rifles and pistols had turned the course of history. How the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo unleashed the First World War. How the killing of Martin Luther King pushed the US closer to equal race rights. They spoke of how the gun has helped bring advances in industrial production methods and advanced modern medicine. And they all spoke of death.
There, on the far wall, one rack held a familiar shape: the long, curved magazine, the wooden stock, the iron sights. A gun that could fire automatically like a machine-gun, or could let loose single shots, like a sniper rifle; that could be chucked in a river and dragged in the mud and still not jam; a weapon so popular that tens of millions of them have been made. It was the Kalashnikov or AK47, the most famous and the deadliest gun in the world. So practical and lethal has it proved in modern conflict that it has featured on the coats of arms of Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and East Timor. There are statues to it in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and on the dusty plains outside Baghdad in Iraq. It’s had a cocktail named after it and is a drinks brand in its own right, sold in bottles moulded in its iconic shape. Some parents have even named their babies ‘Kalash’, so deep