Free Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun by Iain Overton

in the road. But the vehicles here were as rugged as the barefoot tribes, and the police car pounded up it with ease, braking in a squeal of metal in the middle of our game.
    A huge man, his shirt straining at his barrel chest, got out of thecar. A Papuan policeman, he was the largest person I had seen up there. He had a thick moustache and wore mirrored aviator glasses, like a 1980s New York cop. He was chewing betel nut, the seed of the areca palm, and his mouth was a red smear. It gave him, along with his heavy black combat boots and the oiled pistol on his hip, a dangerous air.
    He listened to what had happened and climbed onto the bonnet of his vehicle. His voice was forceful and deep. ‘If these white men don’t get their bags back in the next twelve hours,’ he said in the local dialect, ‘I will burn down all the villages in this valley. Each and every building.’
    And that was it: Papuan law enforcement. We were horrified: our uncalled-for presence here had resulted in the threat of a mass burning of villages. We tried to protest, but he ignored our pleas. This was the Highlands, and this was how they did things: a form of retributive justice.
    His threat worked. Twelve hours passed, and our bags turned up, slipped back to us under the cover of night. A neat cut of our money had been sliced off the top, but we were told not to bother about that. The case was settled.
    Looking back on it, perhaps I now see how so much about guns and crime and policing lay in that small episode. The terror of the robbery and the small humiliations that come when you are faced with intimate lethal force. The breakdown of the rule of law in remote and impoverished armed communities. The state’s exercise of power through a stronger, better-armed force and the casual dispensing of justice.
    It was an incident that helped frame my thinking, too, when I was to shift my research away from the illegal use of guns by killers and criminals to looking at those who use their guns in the name of the state: the police.

8. THE MILITARY
    The tragedies of war – Iraq – travelling to the bloody circus in 2004 – visiting the Tree of Knowledge – getting shot at – madness and violence unfurling – Israel’s violent past reflected in guns – tea with an unusual sniper – a visit to a Jewish anti-terror training camp – Palestine’s tragedy – a wounded boy, a grieving father – Liberia’s past visited – child soldiers and adult tales
    Militaries and guns are synonymous; an army that is not armed cannot really be called as such. It’s no surprise there are 200 million guns in the hands of armed forces around the world: about one in five of all guns. So you can’t write a book about firearms without understanding the gun’s role in war and its military use – for good or bad – in defending a nation’s sovereignty. After all, there are only fifteen countries in the world that do not have a military, and six countries that have militaries but no standing army. 1
    In the remaining countries, the 200 million weapons are unevenly distributed: the armies of just two states, China and Russia, have almost 25 per cent of them. And they are certainly not all in use. Around 76 million guns in the hands of armed forces lie idle; they are deemed ‘surplus’ – stockpiles make up about 38 per cent of all military small arms. 2
    But when war does break out, it is clear that there are enough guns out there to cause untold carnage. Since the end of the Second World War there have been over 2,100 conflicts in more than 150locations. 3 In 1998 a charity called Project Ploughshares said that in over ‘three dozen current wars, probably 90 per cent of killings are by small arms . . . in the past decade alone they have caused more than 3 million deaths’. 4 This is a bold statement and one that led some to say that about 300,000 people were dying from guns fired in conflicts every year.
    But charities have reasons to sound the death knell a