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 as many as 90 per cent of deaths in conflicts are from being shot,6 an estimated level of 300,000 homicides with guns every year seems reasonable. Then there are the suicides. The World Health Organization has estimated that 800,000 people kill themselves each year. As one of the leading ways to end it is with a firearm, a figure of 200,000 suicides by firearm a year also seems a reasonable estimate to make.7
This all adds up to about half a million people dying every year from gunfire.
The type of deaths from guns, clearly, differs from country to country. If you live in the US or Canada, suicides account for the majority of gun deaths. In countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia or Albania the majority of gun deaths are homicide. Eastern Europe and southern Africa have lots of murder, but not many by firearm. Southern Europe and northern Africa don’t have many murders, but when they do, it’s much more likely to be with a gun.
The US stands out. Americans suffer about 80,000 non-fatal injuries and 30,000 deaths every year involving guns.8 It works out at just over eighty deaths a day. Things get even worse when you travel south. Although home to just 14 per cent of the world’s population, Latin America accounts for 42 per cent of all firearm-homicides worldwide.9
These figures, though, conceal one problem. As Eric Berman told me, there is a fundamental difficulty getting any figures worth a damn. Many countries don’t have proper ways to establish who has died violently, let alone how. Even in relatively developed South Africa, where gun deaths overshadow all other ‘external’ causes of death, only a third of death records are available for analysis.10 The World Health Organization’s mortality database provides figures for just seven sub-Saharan African countries.
From the data that are available, though, we know that, if you look at the rankings of how people are murdered, Puerto Rico tops the table with 95 per cent of homicides there being with a firearm.11 We also know Brazil has the most gun homicides in the world outside a war zone in terms of sheer numbers.12 And, perhaps of surprise to some, the worst place in the world for gun violence per capita is not the US, but the Central American country of Honduras. And there’s one city there that stands out as the world’s epicentre of gun violence: San Pedro Sula – the most violent city on earth not at war.
This fact was new to me. I had been to Latin America before – the story about gun violence in Brazil was just one of a number of things I had reported on in the previous fifteen years. From drug addiction involving the powerful cocaine residue paco to the rise of the left in Latin politics, I’d travelled to many counties there, camera in hand. But I had never been to Honduras as anything but a tourist, and even then the violence that gripped that land was hidden from me.
This time, though, I felt I had to travel straight to that heart of darkness of San Pedro Sula, to