Gun Baby Gun

Iain Overton

(Canongate, £10.99)

In researching this book, Overton, an investigative reporter for the organisation Action on Armed Violence, took on a mammoth task: examining every aspect of man’s relationship with firearms. Not surprisingly, he covered as much ground geographically as intellectually. Gun Baby Gun takes him from San Pedro Sula in Honduras, the most violent city on Earth, to Iceland, where homicide is virtually unknown despite a high rate of gun ownership.

He uncovers some staggering facts along the way: every year, half a million people are killed by guns and 12 million bullets are manufactured; there are more gun stores in the US than McDonald’s; in Cambodia, for $550, you can hire a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and fire it at a live cow.

As well as witnessing the sharp end of the global guns epidemic, he looks at the web of connections reinforcing the power of weapons manufacturers through lobbyists and politicians, and the role of the USA, Russia and China (the three main producers) in the proliferation of small arms around the world.

Among the many disturbing trends noted by Overton is the “ongoing militarisation” of the US police, which is now using SWAT teams for situations which would, in the past, have been dealt with by a couple of officers dropping round for a quiet word. It’s symptomatic of an escalation in the arms race between police and criminals in the US that shows no signs of abating.

Firearms, it seems, have their own irresistible momentum. Furthermore, Overton writes, of an Israeli training camp, “The atmosphere was febrile. Guns only increased the intensity, the madness. They seemed to make dialogue impossible [...]” Here he touches on a point that resonates throughout the book. Somehow, guns reduce options, their presence closing off alternatives and channelling events in the direction of violence. The same principle applies to suicide. One study of survivors of attempted suicide using guns found that 40 per cent had been contemplating shooting themselves for only five minutes before carrying it out.

“For each truth I alighted upon, another seemed to run counter to it,” he writes at the end of his journey. Nevertheless, he feels his efforts to write as definitive a study as possible of the “transformative power” of the gun have given him a more complete picture than any manufacturer, lobbyist or gang member will ever know, and his conviction that they lead nowhere but Hell is unshaken.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT

Iain Overton is appearing at Glasgow book festival Aye Write!, for which The Herald is media partner, on Sunday March 13. See ayewrite.com