Gun Crime in Global Contexts

Peter Squires

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138937390
• eBook ISBN: 9781136184635
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Every year around three-quarters of a million people die (directly or indirectly) as a result of gun violence, with most deaths occurring in the poorest, yet also most highly weaponized parts of the world. Firearm proliferation -- 875 million global firearms -- is a direct contributor to both regional conflicts and to crime. This book attempts to understand the inter-related dynamics of supply and demand which are weaponizing the world.

Now over ten years after Peter Squires's Gun Culture or Gun Control?, the issues pertaining to gun violence and gun control have developed dramatically. With Gun Crime in Global Contexts, Peter Squires offers a cutting-edge account of contemporary developments in the politics of gun crime and the social and theoretical issues that surround the problem. This book contains:

• an innovative political analysis of neo-liberal globalization and weapon proliferation;
• an overview of recent gun control debates and gang strategies in the UK;
• an updated analysis of US gun politics: self-defence, race and the 'culture war';
• a critical analysis of US school and rampage shootings, how they have impacted the gun debate and how different societies have responded to mass shootings;
• an examination of the UN's development of an Arms Trade Treaty (2001--13);
• a discussion of weapon trafficking;
• discussions about youth gangs around the world, including those in Brazil, Kenya, West Africa, Mexico and South Africa.

With its interdisciplinary perspective and global reach, this book will be important reading for academics and students interested in youth and gang crime, violent crime and comparative criminal justice, as well as peace and security studies and international relations.

PART 1

Introduction

1

GUNS AS A GLOBAL ISSUE

A spectre is haunting civilization, the spectre of an indiscriminate proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW).

Gunfire as a social relationship

Any analysis of the global context of gun crime is inevitably related to a series of further questions regarding the design, production and marketing of firearms; the distribution of them – who gets them; and the uses, or misuse, to which they are put. Finally, in the global context, it concerns the places in which they are most often used or misused. But this raises a further question, given that a firearm is most dangerous precisely when it is used as it is designed to be used (Springwood, 2007a): what is it to ‘misuse’ a gun?

Some of our earlier questions are technical, even scientific: for instance ergonomic (how does the gun handle?); structural and metallurgical (what is it made of and how robust are the components?); design related (what does it look like?); and ballistic (how does it shoot?). Other questions involve the law, rights, control and governance (and their limits): who gets to have a gun and what can they do with it? The issues pursued by this book, however, are more obviously social and moral, in part, because what a firearm does, what it is designed for, has largely been predetermined. Modern hunting weapons and shotguns are generally fit for purpose: hunting or target shooting. Contemporary production handguns, however, are now generally closely modelled upon (or are identical to) military combat weapons, while the growing enthusiasm of the US gun-owning public¹ for military-style assault rifles, and the proliferation around the globe of the ubiquitous AK-47 and its derivatives, is achieving what many commentators (see for example Diaz, 2013) have referred to as a ‘militarization’ of civilian firearm ownership, beginning, arguably, to collapse a distinction between ‘criminal’ and ‘conflict’ firearms (Marsh, 2012: 13).

The significance of this ‘militarization’ of civilian gun ownership and, more broadly, the weaponization of communities around the world, lies in the fact that contemporary firearms are very good at what they are designed for – dispensing bullets rapidly and efficiently, in other words, killing quickly. So the issue of gun misuse is not a question of technical capacity, despite occasional malfunctions, for many incidents might testify to the efficient killing power of modern firearms (this is, after all, what they were designed to do), for example efficiency, durability and ease of use were amongst the reasons for the global success of the AK-47 as compared with the original American M-16s (Chivers, 2010); even children can and did use them. So the question of gun misuse is not related to its capacity to fire bullets quickly and efficiently, rather, the real questions are about who gets to do this? Who uses the gun, against whom and under what circumstances? These are irretrievably social, moral and, for my own part, criminological questions; and they foreground profoundly social relationships.²

It is important to start here, in part because when, in later chapters, the discussion turns to weapon proliferation and the weaponization of homes, communities or even whole societies; weaponization conceived as a dangerous vector of neo-liberalism or an ominous dimension of risk globalization, the argument is not one about a kind of technological determinism where guns ‘cause’ violence. Rather, weapon technologies, gun use and misuse are socially embedded and socially meaningful (Greene and Marsh, 2012b: 9). Gun enthusiasts, critics of gun control, often complain that it is wrong to focus exclusively upon firearms as a supposed cause of problems but, as Currie has argued, this claim misses a more important sociological point: ‘the role of guns in violent crime cannot be considered in isolation from other conditions that influence the likelihood of violence, such as the degree of inequality, the depth of social exclusion, and the erosion of family and community supports’ (2005: 106–107). Even the US NRA, an organization with which this book finds relatively few areas of agreement, sometimes get close to recognizing this. A gun may be a tool, although never just a tool; ‘guns don’t kill people; people kill people’, they argue. Although NRA spokesmen seldom go on to acknowledge the corollary: that while guns may not cause violence, they do tend make it more likely, more lethal, more widespread, more harmful, more protracted, more entrenched and more likely to recur. As Currie concludes, it is ‘hard to avoid the conclusion that, in conditions that are otherwise conducive to breeding violent crime, the wide prevalence of guns compounds and “lethalizes” those problems’ (2005: 108). But these violent outcomes are the result of human behaviours and social and political relationships; the efficacy of firearms is a result of the uses to which humans put them (Ashkenazi, 2012: 229); guns just make killing really simple. One of the central questions explored in a recent book edited by Greene and Marsh, Small Arms, Crime and Conflict (2012a) precisely concerns the extent to which the availability and proliferation of SALW represent ‘significant independent variables in processes of armed violence, conflict, security or development’ (Greene and Marsh, 2012d: 250). Much research on violence and conflict merely views weaponization as a symptom of conflicts driven by deeper or wider social, political, economic or ethnic or ideological processes. Here, however, in common with Currie and Greene and Marsh, and developing the concept of weaponization in specific local contexts, our argument concurs with their remark that ‘variations in the characteristics, availability and flows of arms can significantly affect the wider risks, dynamics, extent, and lethality of armed violence, conflict, insecurity and obstacles to development’ while, traversing the academically distinct fields of conflict and crime, ‘the ready availability of handguns or automatic weapons can qualitatively affect the lethality, scale or implications of violence, with enduring consequences’ (Greene and Marsh, 2012d: 250).

Variety and difference in local contexts should not be overlooked either, everywhere is not the same, there is no such thing as a ‘global gun culture’ (Ashkenazi, 2012: 231); there are distinct local cultures in which firearms and weaponization exert a different, perhaps more or less powerful, influence. There may be tightly controlled or chaotically uncontrolled ‘gun cultures’; moreover ‘control’ in this sense is not reducible to the law and its enforcement, informal social controls, traditions of firearm ownership and use, personal responsibility or self-discipline, can all help keep the negative consequences of firearm proliferation in check. Warring groups can negotiate a cease-fire; urban gangs may agree a truce and most social groups, to some degree, regulate the behaviour of their members. Even in violent gang and gun cultures, most young men do not act violently most of the time (Greene and Marsh, 2012d: 254). There was always something mistaken in the popular misconception that gang communities were awash with firearms and the young men in them chaotically and uncontrollably violent, in fact weapon discharges were still relatively rare and a form they often took, ‘drive-by shootings’, although seemingly wanton and indiscriminate, generally only targeted doors or windows, buildings or cars. In other words, this was shooting as ritual, performance or communication: a message in a bullet or ballistic graffiti (Squires, 2011a).

Later on I introduce the notion of ‘regime’ analysis in order to characterize different degrees of effective governance over violence and disorder. Simply put, strong states generally manage levels of violence and disorder, they develop strong disincentives to weaponization which reduces the overall demand for guns and therefore prevents the influx of firearms which might destabilize law and order. Weaker or failing states, by contrast, or ‘post-conflict’ societies, may find themselves caught in a vicious circle whereby they cannot achieve a monopoly of armed force within their own territory and cannot dampen the demand that brings an illicit supply of firearms to armed factions, organized criminal groups or gangs which, in turn, render law enforcement ineffective. They therefore cannot even protect their own citizens. A sudden massive influx of weapons into either types of society is unlikely to represent a positive development, but while the former may have the infrastructure to contain the criminal violence which might ensue, in the latter extra weapons may simply widen and deepen the conflict.

Synthesis and innovation

In diverse global contexts SALW are employed in both conflict and crime, indeed as I have already noted, these types of violence may no longer seem so distinct: war itself is a major facilitator of criminal violence; terrorism and political insurgency are often funded by the proceeds of crime, narco traffickers exercise regional governance via corruption, assassination and force of arms, civilians are acquiring military specification weapons and the ‘new’ forms of asymmetric or ‘fourth generation’ warfare have blurred distinctions between civilians and combatants – as both casualties and perpetrators (Newman, 2004: 174–175). That said, the scope of the book, even as it begins from traditional criminology, has to embrace the full range of ways in which weaponization fuels criminal violence and conflict. One ambition of the book, therefore, is intellectual and academic synthesis.

Firearm use and misuse certainly features in criminology but, in societies such as the UK, where gun crime (as presently defined) represents only some 0.25 per cent of recorded crime, it is far from being a mainstream issue, notwithstanding its more symbolic significances (Squires, 2008a). Criminology itself generally engages with firearms at the ‘end-game’ – at the crime scene where guns have been illegally fired, but tries, occasionally, to shift its emphasis upstream into trafficking and criminal supply. In the US, by contrast, a vast body of quantitative criminology exists, often rather inconclusively mining the impact of any number of diverse firearm acquisition restrictions upon rates of weapon misuse.³ Rather more useful sociological analyses have focused upon the contexts and social relations of gun use and misuse, the meanings associated with gun possession by those who use them (Wilkinson, 2003; Kohn, 2004b; Harcourt, 2006; Pogrebin et al., 2009; Carlson, 2012; see also Chapter 5).

Arms control scholars, on the other hand, tend to start from the supply side, focussing upon the production and distribution of weapons. Their work engages with criminological issues at the lower ends of these supply chains where illegal weapon trafficking, close to the actual contexts of criminal firearm misuse, occurs (Spapens, 2007; De Vries, 2011). It was once assumed that illicit supply, by shady international weapons dealers and brokers⁴ or ‘rogue states’, was the source of most of the weapons that were criminally misused, but more recent research shows that patterns of illicit global weapon supply mirror very closely the patterns of supply for legal small arms (Lumpe, 2000; Bourne, 2007). The real regulation issue, then, becomes one concerning the slippage of weapons from the legal to illegal spheres. This issue has been of particular interest and concern for scholars of international relations. Although small arms regulation only represents a small part of a complex field of inter-state relations, the work of international relations (IR) specialists has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the role of international treaties, international law, arms embargoes and end-user certification, and the ways in which the global architecture of governance, such as the UN and other, more regional, inter-state bodies (for example the EU, NATO, the Organization of American States and the Economic Community of West African States) has contributed to the outlawing of certain types of weapons (chemical weapons, land mines and cluster munitions), and has helped contain the proliferation of small arms, while attempting to guide errant or conflict states to higher standards of governance (Sands, 2005).

Finally, from the fields of peace and development studies, there has emerged a vast array of local and regional case studies of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) and social and economic redevelopment. A good deal of such work has developed around the work of NGOs involved in development and peace building (the Red Cross, Oxfam, Amnesty International or International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA)) and has necessarily focused upon the role of weapons, widely diffused into communities as a result of recent conflicts, hampering the rebuilding of trust or achieving reconciliation. Case studies with a more anthropological perspective have often been able to throw much light upon the local consequences of weaponization (Richards, 1996; Goldstein, 2003). Weaponized violence may have brutalized whole communities, undermined social cohesion, discouraged investors and eliminated more traditional structures of authority (Greene and Marsh, 2012c: 100–102); young men who have spent their early teens carrying a gun and participating in terrible acts of violence (even if coerced) may find it difficult to revert to civilized living (Louise, 1995). Other armed groups, having become accustomed to carrying firearms and getting their way, may feel somewhat reluctant to give them up – as in Nigeria (Ikelegbe, 2005). In such settings, the local practicalities of disarmament, as social and economic redevelopment, or crime prevention, or peace building, need to be continuously alert to arms control matters and the dangers of renewed weapon supplies which might trigger further outbreaks of violence.

It follows that, in this book, one aim is to bring some synthesis to these four dimensions of the global gun question, four dimensions that have often pursued their own agendas quite separately, even down to a focus upon different kinds of weapons. For as Marsh (2012: 13) has noted, handguns have typically been the choice of the criminal whereas anyone contemplating conflict or civil war needed assault rifles or more automatic weapons. By contrast, as Greene and Penetrante (2012: 151) observe, misuse of sporting guns has seldom contributed to political conflict. As we shall see, however, these distinctions are breaking down. Furthermore, in the context of globalization, weapon trafficking, and other crimes committed to facilitate further crime, connects many areas of an increasingly globalized criminology: the crimes of states, political crime, organized crime, cross-border crime, genocide and human rights violations, international policing and law enforcement, peace and conflict studies. Synthesis alone, around these many dimensions of global gun crime, is a tall order raising important questions.

Greene and Marsh have likewise pointed to a number of gaps between the study of gun crime in settled, advanced, liberal-democratic societies, chiefly the preserve of criminology and gun violence in fragile, broken or developing states, often conducted alongside the work of NGOs and arms control organizations. It is likely that there are important, transferable knowledges and important lessons to be learned across these differing contexts; about the community consequences of weaponization, about masculinity, young men and the attractions of firearms, about gangs and armed criminal groups and about the impact of weapons on families and gender relationships. There are also lessons to learn about public safety and policy change; how might gun regimes be changed, what works in other societies. I will be exploring these issues later, but there are often problems when criminologists venture abroad, especially when they travel to wholly different types of societies where the rule of law and systems of governance are compromised or fragile, and law enforcement non-existent, or corrupt, or just one of the parties in a conflict. In many of these respects a genuine cross-cultural criminology is still in its infancy, but its research agenda needs to develop quickly; the various research communities have much to tell to one another and plenty to learn (Greene and Marsh, 2012c: 103–104; 2012d).

This leads to the, perhaps, more ambitious, aim of the book. Beyond synthesis of existing work, the book aims to offer a theoretically innovative and multi-disciplinary approach to the phenomenon of weaponization in the context of a globalizing, neo-liberal world. Findlay (1999) has earlier described how both trans-national crime and crime control can be seen as forces of globalization, here, by extension, I am also treating weapon trafficking as a vector of neo-liberalization bringing sovereign capacity to human agents through their firepower. In a revised take on the claim attributed to Samuel Colt, producer of the first repeating revolver, guns are not so much ‘equalizers’ or ‘peacemakers’, rather they transform through empowerment, turning powerless subjects into citizens and players, decision-makers for the neo-liberal world. In one sense, just as Marx described the creation of the working class as labour power, made up of many millions of factory ‘hands’ (Bauman, 1982), so weapon proliferation and weaponization give us the elusive ‘gunman’, the citizen/combatant of ‘asymmetrical’ or ‘fourth generation’ warfare in an insecure ‘global South’.

Older commentaries on military discipline, illustrated, for example, in Foucault’s work (1977: 135–141) revealed how a training in firearms ‘made the man’; here, by contrast, I am exploring how weaponization ‘re-makes’ masculinity, militarizing the mind (Muggah, 2001) and attaching a lethal capacity to youthful immaturity, with often terrifying consequences. Jacklyn Cock, for example, writing of the reconstruction of armed masculinity amongst the gangs of South Africa, refers to the ideology expressed in the American bumper sticker: ‘An armed man is a citizen; an unarmed man is a subject’ (Cock, 2000: 90). This illustration appears in a chapter in a three volume series of books produced by the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, titled Society under Siege (Gamba and Meek, 1997–2000). The work characterizes post-apartheid South Africa as besieged by organized crime, weapon flows, armed gangs, opposition militias and local ‘cultures’ of gun use and misuse. Similarly, despite the reticence of some commentators, this book will employ the notion of gun culture, always in specific local contexts, as an outcome of weaponization, just as Cukier and Sheptycki (2012: 4) describe ‘pistolization’, the way...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 Safe European home?
• PART 3 The land of the free and the home of the gun
• PART 4 Global dimensions
• Bibliography
• Index